The Sweet Smells Poem by Robert Rorabeck

My mother is back at home, and the canals are
Fully filled, engorged beneath the catwalks as they
Were billed;
And she is making an annoyance as she tidies up and
Eats curious things:
She smells like planted endives smelled by hungry
Hares out in the blearing rains;
But now I am not so alone, and I can crawl back up to
The light and smile as if my head were just sweetened
On a soft abutment while she
Read to me by even softer candlelight;
And the world waves angelically, the cars growing still softer
In the distance:
I can almost hear my dogs whimpering beneath the naked
Aspen,
Feral and curious to the proximity of my distance, how
My wounded smells still might betray them in the middle of the
Night;
And like my mother, I would like to come to them at the end of
My body’s work,
And lay in between them soft and nuzzled, turning with them
As if on a Ferris Wheel where my eyes were always closed
Having a fare day caracoling again in this gravity,
Not even supposing I would ever again need to fear,
Looking down at the graveyard far away
I was even then returning to the sweet smells she fed to me.