True Love
By Sharon Olds
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each
other
like mountaineers coming down from a
mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I
can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each
other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere
in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and
I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see
beyond it.
This is
the only poem where I wanted, or more truthfully, the poem demanded two
fragrances.
True Love is one of my most precious poems; I am quite
overcome by Sharon Olds when I read her sensual and open work. Her words read
like intimate confessions, yet strike our hearts and minds with real physical
force. She is brutally honest, yet a tactile and emotive writer, her work is anchored
in all of our physical realities. She dissects the body, heart and mind with
almost unbearable precision.
Her most recent
collection Stag’s Leap was
extraordinary. An intimate and shared journey through the slow and painful
disintegration of Old’s marriage. The
poems were written over fourteen years and Old’s has allowed us to glimpse into
a sacred house of intimacy and witness the wars and love the rooms have witnessed.
I struggled with the intensity of them, and will need to return to them as an
ongoing commitment, like talking to a friend after trauma. She was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Stag’s Leap, a
strangely public prize for such private work. But this in many ways is poetry,
the sharing of scars and intimacies, the transmissions of love and pain that
lay down messages for us to pick up and imbibe.
True Love is taken from Wellspring, a moist and intimate collection, dealing awash with
sex, death, birth and the ties that bind us at so many times of our fraught
lives. Invisible or not, some ties hold, some strangle. I return to this group
of poems again and again. They are nighttime words, sex words. I have read them
to strangers in hotel rooms, read them in flickering bedroom light, feeling
each word like a needle or a caress depending on my mood.
….I know where you are,
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each
other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex..
When I
read these lines. I knew I had to have Amaranthine
by Penhaligon’s. Created by Bertrand Duchaufour in 2009, this carnal, corrupted
floral changed many people’s perceptions of the classic English house. Bertrand
was given carte blanche to create something shocking. It was his first
commission for Penhaligon’s and is in my opinion the best fragrance the house has
ever done. Loaded with two huge beating heart
notes of jasmine and ylang-ylang absolutes, Amaranthine
assaults the senses. Ylang has to be
controlled in fragrance. Early mods of Amaranthine
were rejected for failing to comply with IFRA guidelines. Ylang has a
reputation as aphrodisiac oil; high doses cause dizziness, rapid heartbeat and
nausea. Love, hate and desire essentially.
I said
the poem demanded two fragrances. Two bodies, one mix. So to echo the comfort
and physical recognition of the couple in True Love, I chose Vanille Absolument by L’Artisan
Parfumeur also created by Bertrand. It was important to me to have two perfumes
by the same nose. They would meld, echo, subvert and obsess each other.
This has
been my signature scent since it launch in 2009. Sadly it has been discontinued,
so I have been forced to buy up bottles wherever I can. A fabulously sexed-up vanilla, soaked in rum
and smoked with the sweet caramel tones of Cuban tobacco. Piracy, cane sugar,
sweat and heat. Things are wrapped in one of the most buttery burnt twisted
vanilla ever made.
It almost
overwhelms you where you first spray it on; dizzying in its intensity, pungent
with a whiff of what seems like burnt butter. This butyric twist is lit through
with plumes of smoky tobacco and rounded off with tonka bean, the licorice lick
of immortelle and narcissus absolutes. This heart of smoke and mirrors precedes
the final dazzling act of vanilla absolutes, smoked woods, musk, benzoin, Tolu
balsam and mosses. These base elements sway slowly across the skin like an ancient
ritualistic dance in a room walled in amber, the air liquid with love.
Everything is honeyed, sweet, smoked and warm.
Wearing
or smearing these fragrances together seems almost obscene. So much sex, the
rolling of skin, the heat of post-coital tenderness… Old’s ‘shadowless air’,
the oxygen and light burned up by such committed intensity. Yet both scents
have kernels of intimacy that remain separate from the other. The porny
corrupted milk and shattered flora of Amaranthine
gives way to a languorous unfurling of scented fingers and limbs. Vanille Absolument drops into a
half-remembered movie moment of shared cigarettes and bruised skin, the air
humid with desire.
Bertrand
Duchaufour has imagined the vanilla pod as skin, wrapped around the most
delicious rum and raisin internals, underpinned with radiant balsamics and the
most exquisite amber and woods. His trademark atmospherics vibrate, shimmer and
open out on the skin, widening Vanille
Absolument into a panoramic wonder.
This skin
facet, the effect of comfortable post-coital scent resonates with the poem, the
ease of one other, and the intimacy of shared spaces. The physical act of love,
still so tender and meaningful. The kids doze, the couple treasure a moment in
a bathroom, so full of familiarity, the drama of sudden awareness, of oncoming
fragility, looms large as snow against the glass. The view is blocked. For a
moment, they cannot see beyond it.
Or beyond
each other, beyond their lives or just the simple piles of white crystals
drifting up against the glass. There is a telescoping of emotion at the end. I
would like to imagine them, skins cross-scented with vanilla, ylang and
tobacco, listening to snow fall, reaching for each others fingers in the dark.
No comments:
Post a Comment