Attar

Big trees grew smaller, small ones big.
I could reach the third crotch of the willow,
tiptoe to catalpa pods once shinnied up after.
A fig surreptitiously picked smacked of
delights so simple they had passed me by,
mulberries mixed with tar from telephone
poles tasting of wine from Provence.
With gentle, bruising brushes, as one might
caress a clitoris, I turned gardenia
brown, its honeysuckle taint redolent
of the boy I no longer was. Amnesia
may be tractable to olphactory cure.
Without our cicerone smell
it’s blind lead deaf; deaf, the blind.

***
This thought I had the other day. The more I thought it, the more it took the form of a mute sonnet. < Pastis