The Scent of Yesterday

I.
Memories float like dust motes in amber light,
Dancing through shafts of late autumn sun—
Each particle a fragment of what's gone,
Suspended in the space between then and now.
Mother's garden soil beneath fingernails,
The sharp green scent of tomato vines,
Crushed mint and marigolds standing guard,
Their pungent armor keeping pests at bay.

II.
Time has a perfume all its own:
Musty pages of forgotten books,
Grandfather's pipe tobacco lingering
In the fibers of his favorite chair,
Though both are long since ash.
The attic's holy must, its sacred dust,
Where childhood treasures hibernate
In cardboard reliquaries.

III.
School days rise like incense:
Chalk dust and pencil shavings,
Cafeteria mystery meat and sour milk,
The copper penny taste of blood
From playground scrapes,
And always, always,
That industrial pine cleaner
Making futile war on youth's entropy.

IV.
First love smelled of drugstore perfume,
CK One and teenage dreams,
Movie theater popcorn butter
Sticky-sweet on nervous fingers
That dared not touch, but longed to.
The leather seats of borrowed cars,
Night air rushing through open windows,
Freedom's first intoxicating draught.

V.
College years fermented in basement parties:
Stale beer and cheaper vodka,
Clove cigarettes smoked by wannabe poets,
Instant ramen and coffee gone cold
During all-night study sessions,
That particular bouquet of unwashed sheets
And ambitious desperation
That marks each dormitory room.

VI.
The city taught new scents:
Subway steel and stranger's secrets,
Hot garbage ripening in August sun,
The ghost of someone's cooking
Drifting through thin apartment walls—
Curry, garlic, fish sauce, dreams—
While sirens sang their urban hymns
And taxi exhaust wrote sonnets in the air.

VII.
Office life distilled to essence:
Burned break room coffee,
Dry-cleaned ambition,
Someone's microwave popcorn
Marking time like a charred clock,
The chemical pine trying to mask
The staleness of recycled air
And recycled conversations.

VIII.
Love matured to morning breath
And shared shampoo,
The comfort-scent of laundered sheets,
Sunday breakfast burning slightly
While we lingered over coffee,
Reading separate sections,
Speaking without words
In the language of familiar silence.

IX.
Children brought their own perfumes:
Talcum powder, first teeth,
The sweet milk-breath of infants,
Band-aids and bubble gum,
Grass stains and growing pains,
The particular fragrance of fever
Breaking in the pre-dawn hours
When worry keeps its vigil.

X.
Each holiday preserved in amber:
Pine needles and paraffin,
Turkey skin growing golden,
Grandmother's perfume mixing with
Her secret recipe stuffing,
The metallic tang of snow approaching,
Woodsmoke threading through bare branches
Like memories seeking home.

XI.
Grief has its own cologne:
Hospital corridors at midnight,
The too-sweet flowers of sympathy,
Dust gathering on unused pillows,
The lingering trace of aftershave
On unworn shirts in closets,
The smell of earth upturned
To swallow what we cannot keep.

XII.
Time moves like perfume through a room:
First overwhelming, then subtle,
Until you barely notice it at all—
Until some vagrant breeze
Through an open window
Stirs the curtains of memory,
And suddenly you're lost
In the scent of yesterday.

XIII.
The garden soil still holds its secrets:
Copper pennies buried for luck,
Lost marbles gleaming like cats' eyes,
The coffee cans of childhood treasure
Now oxidized to archaeology.
The mint still grows wild
Where mother planted it,
Defiant against the seasons.

XIV.
The attic keeps its own calendar:
Marking time in layers of dust,
Christmas decorations hibernating in July,
Summer clothes dreaming through winter,
Each box a capsule of suspended time
Waiting to release its cargo
Of scent and memory
When the seals are broken.

XV.
Some days the past rises like bread:
Yeast and patience working invisible magic,
Until the whole house fills
With the aroma of remembrance.
We gather in the kitchen,
Drawn by scents we can't name
But recognize bone-deep
As the perfume of belonging.

XVI.
Old photographs yellow at the edges,
Their colors shifting like autumn leaves,
But the scents they capture stay true:
Beach air salt-thick on sunburned skin,
Birthday candles and wishful thinking,
The sweet decay of fallen apples
In the orchard where we learned
Time is measured by seasons.

XVII.
Sometimes in dreams we catch it:
That particular scent of possibility
That perfumed all our yesterdays,
When future hung like ripe fruit
Just out of reach, when every door
Stood open to adventure,
And we believed in magic
Because we hadn't learned to doubt.

XVIII.
Morning comes with dew and dawn,
The night's secrets evaporating
Like childhood's easy answers.
We wake to find ourselves
Surrounded by the artifacts
Of all our former selves,
Each one preserved in amber,
In memory, in scent.

XIX.
The children have their own gardens now,
Their own treasure boxes,
Their own secret recipes
For happiness and heartbreak.
We watch them plant their memories
Like seeds in fertile soil,
Growing their own trees of knowledge,
Their own flowers of experience.

XX.
Time moves in spiral patterns,
Each turn bringing us back
To where we've been before,
But higher up the helix,
Where the air is thinner
And the view extends forever,
Back through all our yesterdays
And forward into mystery.

XXI.
The scent of now will soon be then:
These coffee grounds, this morning toast,
The laundry tumbling warm and clean,
The season's first snow melting,
The cologne of daily life
That seems eternal, obvious, mundane,
Until it joins the library of memory
Where yesterday keeps its perfumed books.

XXII.
So we catalog our days
In scent and touch and taste,
Each moment precious not for what it is
But what it will become:
A memory preserved in amber,
A story told in perfume,
A yesterday that waits
To catch us unaware.

XXIII.
And when we're gone, what then?
Will others catch the scent
Of all our yesterdays,
Preserved in attic dust,
In garden soil, in wooden beams,
In recipes handed down,
In stories told at twilight
When memory grows long shadows?

XXIV.
Perhaps that's all we ever are:
A gathering of moments,
A collection of sensations,
A library of scents
That tells the story of our days
In perfumed poetry,
Each breath a page turned back
In time's eternal book.

XXV.
So breathe deep, beloved,
Draw in the scent of now:
The coffee growing cold,
The autumn leaves decaying,
The children growing older,
The seasons turning ever,
Each moment becoming memory,
Each today tomorrow's yesterday.