BALMS
Hemmed in by the prim
deodorizing stare
of the rare-book room,
I stumbled over,
lodged under glass, a
revenant ‘Essay on Color’
by Mary Gartside, a woman
I’d never heard of, open
to a hand-rendered
watercolor illustration
wet-bright as the day
its unadulterated red-
and-yellow was laid on
(publication date 1818).
Garden nasturtium hues,
the text alongside
explained, had been
her guide. Sudden as
on hands and knees
I felt the smell of them
suffuse the catacomb
so much of us lives in-
horned, pungent, velvet-
eared succulence, a perfume
without hokum, the intimate
of trudging earthworms
and everyone’s last end’s
unnumbered, milling tenants.
Most olfactory experience
either rubs your nose
in it or tries to flatter
with a funeral home’s
approximation of such balms
as a theology of wax alone
can promise, and the bees
deliver. Mary Gartside
died, I couldn’t even
learn the year. Our one
encounter occurred by chance
where pure hue set loose
unearthly gusts of odor
from earthbound nasturtiums.
Amy Clampitt, 1980
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