Bookmarking a Smell

I smell dead people.

April is the cruellest month and so forth. Comes to mind.

The sun blasted from the sky today and on the way to the TTC, off the TTC, all the way down the Village, I smelled dead people.

At the train station, I smell them and they smell just like garbage roused by the sun to bloatstench. It smells like the past thawing into light and taking sloppy sweet nonshape.

Breeding lilacs. Out of a slumbering land.

They must have not collected the garbage all day today because the smell continues up and down the sidewalk.

It smells like the dead. It smells like Mr. Robinson down the hall in Chicago.

He had been smelling like that for some days that I went by his apartment. I kept saying, I kept saying. I kept thinking, a quiet man like that, always a quiet nod in the hallway, too quiet now. Then, one day, the door was open and the cops clustered, one of them droning into his phone about the African American male, deceased, hanging from the shower rod.

Nor was he the only one.

By the time it smelt of the guy on the ground floor, I already knew the smell. And sure enough, a few days later, the yellow tape.

People die in rooms all around but it is still odd to smell them on a bright spring day, tipsy with tulips.