Whom had he loved, what had he loved, he asked himself in a tumult of emotion, until now?

He had indeed just brought his feet together about six in the evening of the seventh of January at the finish of some such quadrille or minuet when he beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person.  Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind.    He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds;  he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. 

Virgina Woolf's, Tilda Swinton's and Sally Potter's Orlando

A word which is not

                                                                              ...the whole room swells

                                                                              with the scent of cinnamon & desire.

                                                                              How imprecise the smell of desire.

                                                                              -Mathew Nienow, "Ode to the Belt Sander 

                                                                               & This Cocobolo Sapwood"

To forge a word
                           which is not
to make it out of someone else's breath
to open up and give it a home
                                                 inside
to keep it unspoken among blankets
where there is no room for fear of pleasure
no room for thought

If anything, it would have to be the name of a scent
                                                                                  and of its alchemy
lavender turning into something incandescent and sharp
like cinnammon
                         or crimson red

or a thousand different glasses reflecting one same flame