Do!

See

West Philadelphia

Hear

Patrick Wolf: Bermondsey Street

Smell

"Sigmund Frued famously claimed that humans have lost their sense of smell through evolution. But by his early thirties, he had so many sinus problems he was a medical nightmare and probably couldn't smell anything. So he assumed everyone else couldn’t either. Well, there's a Freudian term for that: it’s called projection."

-Avery Gilbert

Taste

Tomato Tartine

Feel
Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ....

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

"Sweetness" by Stephen Dunn from New and Selected Poems 1974-1994