Gene Youngblood
Synaesthesia
for Sonja
We could smell that sheet of lightning
at the Broadmoor
when it cracked the world around us
and splintered the oak
and spilled our gin
and sent us to our room
screwy and buzzing in separate beds,
wired for supper with the cattle barons
under the buffalo's severed head.
You smelled like turquoise
and tasted like rolling thunder:
Thunder that burst
like pate on my tongue,
Redolent turquoise that drew
those lightning bugs
blinking around your moonlit thighs
in the convertible
in the cornfield
near Amherst.
Thanks for leaving my name with the new doorman
but I won't be using the apartment anymore.
There's a silence inside
that tastes like the dust in the carpet.
And there must be a crack where
that scent of turquoise gets in
to float on the still air
like your voice.
July 1999
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