Headlights
Let’s workshop this poem about an inadvertent tragedy that results from a man's attempt to stop a kidnapping.
scent of the day: Haxan, by Prissana
Häxan (2018, Prin Lomros and Rajesh Balkrishnan)—a shape-shifting gothic fougère that takes the lanolin-wrapped barnyard minimalism of Goat by Wolf Brothers (its cleaner-milkier costus sibling) and adds a bitter-camphor tangle of mossy fermentation and ferny decay one might find stuck in the groove of a foraging goat’s cloven hoof, a damp wad of chlorophyll pulp (like what stops the blade on the underside of a bogged-down lawnmower)—
presents not the Homa-grade brutalism I was expecting (a rodent corpse rotting, after the personal torment of the very same death rushing our way, in the safe-space hollow of a lichen-enveloped log) but rather a surprising core of herbal candy (the jasmine-opoponax-beeswax-citrus combo, along with the apple-hay chamomile and orange-peel vermouth and lemon-oil elemi, perhaps doing the most to reinforce a similar kiwi-bubblegum sweetness, almost gummy-bear like, we get from Interlude Woman and a bit from Indigo Night)
plus an even more surprising aura of aquamarine translucence (the misty diffusion of cashmeran and the mineral-dew of cypress and the wet-stone feel of galbanum reinforcing, especially with the help of fern-rain-in-tin-cup violet leaf, a similar aqueous shimmer we get from the blue lotus of Zoologist’s Sacred Scarab and even, perhaps mainly due to the Last-Season-reminiscent bladderwrack brine, a similar oceanic bioluminescence we get from Seahorse and especially the ambroxan-cetalox-calone cocktail of Squid),
all of this surprise infused with the lavender-absinthe of Opus 2 and Memoir Man (the minty coolness further reinforced here by sage, clary sage, thyme, oregano, and various evergreen notes) and then muddled into a Yatagan-meets-The-Smell-of-Weather-Turning-meets-Dryad wad of humid greenery (slime-glazed moss, sappy spruce, unami seaweed, knife-bright galbanum, and bruised herbs like piney rosemary, earthy thyme, anisic basil, velvet-leafy marjoram, fennel-flecked caraway)
that seems brewed down into a sticky char (leathery labdanum, pine-sap olibanum, licoricey myrrh, tarry styrax, shoe-polish cypriol) that has been sprinkled with warm spice (medicinal clove, earthy nutmeg, bleached-coppery saffron, barky cinnamon, prickly black pepper) and loaded with mushrooms (musty mushrooms that, instead of going in the loamy-soil direction of Figment Man, seem algae-coated enough to promote mainly the sensation of vegetal rot)—
the overall effect being a forest-stream fougère (lavender, clary sage, oakmoss) whose recessive animalics (civet, castoreum, hyrax, musk) work with various greens (especially costus, seaweed, patchouli, oakmoss) to create a wet-cabbage root-cellar funk engulfed in the incense of smoky resins and woods (birch, cypriol, guaiac, tobacco, cedar, sandalwood, styrax, labdanum, olibanum, myrrh),
almost as if you took Goat by Wolf Brothers (a close sibling due to their wet-fur combo of costus, goat hair, and mushrooms) and dosed in some Memoir Man (another sibling due to their dark-moody-fougere overlap of absinthe, lavender, basil, frankincense, tobacco, vetiver, musk, leather, sandalwood, guaiac, oakmoss, and perhaps rose)
or as if you took the animalism of Homa and yet amped up its greenery (especially piney-fir-spruce greenery) with the herb-garden aromatics of Unutamam while also cutting most of the spicy-fiery elements with a cooling combo shot of Squid’s silvery-glow water and Mal-Aime’s weedy-pulp water to impart an aquatic overlay of eucalyptus-like luminescence like we get in Santa Sangre (another scent by Rajesh Balkrishnan) and common to many green scents by Prin (Homa and Rattikarn come to mind);
the overall effect being, in other words, what we might call, given its namesake (the 1922 witchcraft film Häxan) and its costus-galbanum focus, a wicked-witch twist on Dryad, one that brings me to a place that Dryad never could: an Outer Dark setting where, especially along the steep banks of a stream adding an aqueous veil over the mud-sunk remains of a deer, tree roots have risen high from the ground (their knobs looking like rheumatoid knees) as if they were trying to escape the poison of some animating blight, risen enough that the trees (quiet but alive like demented ents) all lean at satanic angles.
Headlights
That paternal shriek no one
could have imagined raging
from his lungs, his diaphragm
plunging deep enough beneath
clock time to jolt the snatcher
brainstalk, carved space
for the kid to twist loose
into the iron breath of machines
failing to brake for a miracle.