Without it, what is lemon, what is mint? –
Coffee and chocolate, caffeinated brown.
Ghosted by a sense that takes no hint,
I feel let down.

It’s hardly tragedy that I can’t tell
The milk’s gone off, eggs rotten. It’s no joke
With other things though – no internal bell
That signals smoke

(The toast burned or the house on fire). Sweet
I have, and bitter, I have sour and salt,
But without smell, no flavour is complete.
There’s no … gestalt.

It’s something I’d predict of old, old age,
This weaning from the welter of the world
The better, perhaps, to leave it. I’m no sage,
I’d rather the impearled

Jasmine flowers – fragrance of the stars –
Light up the brain’s grey matter, and the hurt
Of memory, the human musk of ours
In an unwashed shirt.

‘To have a nose for’– isn’t it a skill,
A wry intelligence, a kind of knack?
What thought trails do I lose, untraceable,
What wisdom lack?

I miss the laundry scent they call ‘unscented’.
Like a depression, it makes it hard to write.
What is is less, less there, half uninvented,
And I, not quite.

But there are days I almost have a whiff:
I slice a lemon open for the crisp
Sun-saturated redolence, and sniff
And stand in the eclipse.

*****

A.E. Stallings writes: “My sense of smell is coming back gradually, but it was completely wiped out for about six months! Unnerving.”

‘Anosmia’ was first published in the London Review of Books.

A.E. Stallings is the current Oxford Professor of Poetry. This Afterlife: Selected Poems was published in 2022. Her forthcoming book is Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

“Smell” by Dennis Wong is licensed under CC BY 2.0.