fragrance

The boulangerie
Opens its sleepy eye
To the bird tweeting village
And looks upon
A once neat boulevard
Aged to a trunk lumpy
Old woman, clucking
Pleasantries as she ambles
With white crusty bread
To her shutter clad dwelling
Limp on its hinges
But crookedly beautiful
With time.

Her garden is put to work:
A crop of gnarled tomatoes
Fruiting in pastel lanterns,
Grapes yellowing
And freckled on the vine
And a font
Where honey oozes
Through the faucets
Of voluptuous figs,
Loosened and falling
As purses unclasped
And relaxing
Amid the gravel
In which herbs muster volatile
In air sweetened
To Provençal notes
And excited to fragrance
By a brush past
Or even the sun
Hot in the radiating stones.

In the summer dusk
all is sweet temptation
in musk of earthy being:
even the grass
is dew sugar first hay,
tender and sun soaked elixir
to horsly kind,
frolicsome and effervescent
to pink noses everywhere.

And what air: warm as comfort,
barefooted and shirt undone,
base note to the roses flood
of velvet, lusty tantalisation:
a shedding of potions loving
and daintily perfumed.

What dwells in this scented night,
but creatures of the stillness,
hid deep from our slice of daily life,
nocturnal to it
and waking only to the moon
and sweetness magic from
disgorging night-flowers.

A hedgehog snuffles and is alive.
Moths are vibrant,
aerialed to the pheromonal moon
and unseen currents high and trail like.
And beetles alight the moonbeams,
unfurl their hidden wings
and step to the unsteady air,
to taste and be beside
the molecules abundant.

distilledvoice

poems by ben truesdale

Southern French Village

In The Summer Dusk

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