What indications carry you now?
after What We Do In Paris is Secret
(for A Lab on Fire by Dominique Ropion)
When your wild and scented dreams finish with
an upward feeling
something which you should like, but is less than the sum of
its parts
Secrets exceed a symphony of splendid repercussion
It’s impossible not to be deluded inside rich vanilla notes
Pink mischievous Turkish, lychee, bergamot
What causes a skindependence?
The first time (honestly) and oh, d’elsewhere?
You leave a vapor trail
What indications carry you now?
Manner, crémeux, declining, honeyed
These are the kinds of words
that make your heart unpack a weapon for a crime
Don’t look any further
[…and other under-the-radar luxuries / with its musky ambery slightly orris touch on skin / by the contrast between the fruity green rosy facet / just opened the funny bag and I like the smell (blind buy) / a perfect name for this perfume which is a pastry, a crime]
Horn chants
Do you need sheet music to
whistle “don’t’ you love me?”
Let’s have a know-nothing
party
We are an art family
Theme? How knowledge
knows how things work
How did the west get its
shape?
How does debt affect your
nervous system?
Lovely floral gourmand scent
which is a more understated variation on Loukhoum
More cakey, less rosy
For this kind of money, I expect a fragrance to last
Do not believe the hype. Don't let it influence you
But then.... there it was
After a couple hours, the typical overly-marketed top notes
fade
and it dries down into this honey-sexied-spicyness
curiously similar to Putain des Palaces
The northern lights form out
of decisions that look like E Flat
The notes pictured above are
all on piano
I was baptized and recorded
The notes wrapped in some
chunky cashmere
Trenches filled with cottage
scandals
Constellations of lyrics and
chords
Scales in a slender and slow
Spanish
the scent of someday
[What is it that creates comfort? When we are young it is our favorite blanket or stuffed animal / As we mature the things that comfort us become... / Dominique Ropion is considered by some to be the most technically advanced perfumer of all time / I'm in Paris for six months and would like to discover the hidden part of the town / We went to the very end of the Passage to a hole in the wall that was last]
A true breeding red flowered,
a redpigment cyanidin
Some cowgirls feel like rain
Slinkies live completely by
reason
A nettled summary in
performative objects
Why are some perfumes darker?
Gardenia oils, samples and
bottles
Some way of dreaming an entering note
is read are known
The you in a monster is not made
When time is a little something that is ended by moving
something else up
A secret symphony of forced echoes exceed the making
An abundance attached to functionality
harmful Turkish musks, ambergris and pink
an impossible lychee not to be puzzled over
Bring an independence that you do not have to explain
As for us, starting from our skin, it’s impossible to maintain
place
Method, creamy, honeyed in decrease
When kind ones are thinking of a kind of word that can plug
your center
one that you do not have to see:
maybe lychee, or Turkish, or pink gasoline
[Share it with the world. Facebook. Update feed. Tear It. Edit. Cancel. Torn. black & white. black & white / Tear the olfactory footprint]
She reads eggs, a rubric
detective
Some stars on earth, some
mushrooms, some crosswords
Something almost said moves
inside her first
Almost being said
Something awful about a
borrowed truck
a dance in awful nightside
torrents
Yellow squash, dusk flowers
inside her grey desk
Even your flowers complain
I can't seem to get over it
It haunts me
the perfect amount of spice with a trail of vanilla
So now I'm crazy over this marvelous perfume
that I wasn't too enthralled with in the beginning
Goodbye $110
I was prepared to love this one more than I did
Wildtangent, brandied
dreams, shootouts
A heart filled with sumac,
cloudrose resin
Daylilies dream next to
their hostas
Daphne, drawer liners,
dragonskies
Cranberry colored lyrics
will burn you down
You wake up with cuts,
stabbing injuries, alligators
But doctor, I’m a
cheerleader, I’m a rocket, I hate pink chugging
alcohols
[See 256 traveler reviews, 108 candid photos, and ... / The staff didn’t really need to do much as we were out first thing and not back till late / +Show map of 2 Rue de Parme, 75009 Paris, France / The perfect cuddly rice scent]
Endless flight paths, seven
feet of Sunday mass
Do you smell smoke when there
is none?
Do you often smell things that
aren’t there?
Tumors, burnt toast, salt
Do you smell like iron after
it’s been left outside?
Fish disease, vinegar,
anti-freeze? Maple syrup?
The planet shakes
The wild dream of coming notes
Scents read to your frank, uneducated parts
The total quantity, sometimes a little something that shifts
in a Paris-ed secret, a symphony of compelling echoes
Where concerns with the real are exceeded
(it should be forming! It is enthusiastic!)
or a vanilla functionality attaches to soft impossible
notes:
harmful Turkish ones, musks
Amber (plentifully available) and pink lychee confuse bergamot
You must not explain your (in)dependences
How can we drive ourselves from our skins?
What kind of word can clog your center?
Bergamotte, lychee, Turkish and tonka, gasoline and tolu
[Need to decide what to see and do during your stay in Paris? / Not to worry, we've done much of the groundwork for you / Just check out our at-a-glance guide / Day two gives a glimpse of an edgier, more secret Paris and includes the extra-uber-ultra-niche-and-divine]
Fat kids love their cake
sayings
Like a fan belt in the poem of
a Barbie
or a math fraction game with a
cat
Pumpkin stencils and lambs
scrubber extractor, smoke and
dust procedures
Measure this with a stopwatch
What is something you would
shout beginning with the letter k?
Or p?
What is something you should
never leave unlocked? This
poem?
You should have kissed me
A pale imitation of Chergui
Every time I wear it I am surprised again
Honey is not an overwhelming note
but just adds a floral nectar
It's like some amazing floral hybrid
where they managed a gourmand tone emanating
from a live, heady flower
Shark saves man drifting at
sea
Should we hyphenate over the
longterm?
Should lovenox burn after
injection?
Should we change the way we
love and feel? Should we be
refrigerated?
Should you look at a
Rauschenberg prior to surgery?
Should love be taken with
food?
It’s easy to be unconditional
But does it float?
[It makes me pine for Sundays in Paris, when the city retreats into its secret corners and everyone manufactures their own sadness / But if you're new to Paris or simply passing through, Sundays can often beg the question: now what do we do?]
Do you scratch your face
hello?
Don’t trust the B in Apt. 23
Don’t smoke in bed before
Christmas
Don’t something
Pressed and fragile levitation
homes
A less than greater symbol
would be a perfect actress
a prison ministry’s least
angel
A wildness enters the dream in some fragrant
way
A scented material notes you on its acknowledgements page
What terminates a likely shift?
The elements of our free compulsions
are like echoed secrets
a symphony of true care surpassed
Is form ever truly warm-hearted?
Tonka enclosed by its own functions
The honey is a result of soft and harmful notes
How to repel our skin for us, when we are not honestly
possible?
Method, butterfat, happy
A kind-hearted word stops at your center and you can’t look at
it
[Their mission is still shrouded in much mystery / You might expect some esoteric little niche scent that will horrify your co-workers / Thirty years ago, in the dead of night, a group of six Parisians and eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for… / “Everything they do is very intense” / They thought: What else could we do?]
The stimulation ignoring
effect, there are serpents in my hands
The sum of two consecutive
integers and their wines
Your interior angles, all
fears square in geometric series
The year’s digits, their
thrills
I have lost the definition of
time
Eigenvalues are positive:
lacefront, possessive, potent,
distribution considered logistics
white lawn fluids, wheat plant
diagram
My name is a blue moon, a
scientology
What words can I make with
these letters
that also echo in the cheap
seats?
So spectacular and radiant, it
was instant love for me
Wonderful stuff, just not my style
except- yeah, this would be a mighty fine scent
for doing "secret stuff" in Paris
We are never getting back
together
We heart it
We don’t have to take our
clothes off
Cows listen to metal roof
complaints
Do your invitations include
accruals?
Do it yourself pest control,
do it yourself divorce
Do inversion tables work?
[Everything is open in the winter and we would have lots to do / The trip stayed a great secret / Christmas came / What would you do if you knew all of the things we knew / Would you stand up and profit? / All in secret so the public never thinks to stop it / The Illuminati triple sixes it all]
Pittsburgh in the past tense
in pace requiescat
in paradisum
in particular
in pari delicto affirmative
defense
Illinois weeds burn for nine
days
It’s always a good idea to
carry a pillow(book)
September sinks in beautiful
sleeping respect
a slender math
Her sea salts were contagious
Her secrets were canceled
secret 7 catfish punch bait
Nouns whisper, their clank
worth buying
A wild vain hope for all fragrant materials
to read you until real care surpasses
You cannot honestly explain your dependences
when they are enclosed in vanilla
Young fat molecular shapes
makes looking possible
[Why should I do something as reckless as buying a “secret” hotel? / Just as soon as we got home, I grabbed a pair of blunt scissors / We meet at 2pm outside the Pont de Saint Cloud metro station (Line 10) / along a scalloped edge, an embroidered overlay / These are the secrets / We know—we were there at Charles de Gaulle to open her cage and see her]
Palos verdes, gorgonian soft
coral sea fan
A fabric-ed amphitheater,
green synonyms, amputatedlyrics
Shiny things, shower curtains,
strands, spelling
sundresses, girl names, a
sympathy of messages
A symphony of prairies and
math
goddesses, destruction and
mountains
Idioms illuminated from
within, their Christmas lights
their inferior social status
Lightness and cohesion
Not high pitched or screechy
The honey stays on my skin
but never renders it into a pastry
Name (if we talk about Paris and secrets you can count me in!)
or the nose - Dominique Ropion - the genius who gave us:
Alien
Carnal Flower
Lalique (Le Parfum)
Flowerbomb
Tactical supernatural
learning, it’s just your lunch
It’s not easy being a bunny
Thoughts about printable
rhythms
This message has been
forwarded
its counts, beats, values,
frequencies, names
and there were no valleys to
shake
You always leave notes lying
around
And that’s why I pray to your
beautiful facts
that your facts become
beautiful
An episodic haunting, their
thinking games
What to do with your body,
under your skin?
Your earlobes like quotes
[So, all we can pry out of their hands
is,"Love is fresh” / We are the counterpoint to an era where
everything is slow and complicated / I do not wish to be a
"secret society," he insists /
What we do is secret / titan radio myelin sheaths
dead man's bones swimsuit the crabs la font british sea
power]
What are some hard things to
say when you’re drunk?
While drunk, with play doh,
with a girl
Are you Sinatra or Sophocles?
Your internal angles total 720
degrees
It’s impossible to please
Elvis now
Impossible nail through wood
trick
The impossible novena
What is the smallest partial question of the
total amount?
When sincerity is an intentional element
Paris exceeds our care in echoes
Consequence is confused with bergamot
Functions are enclosed by the impossible, the harmful
You cannot explain your dependence completely
There are sections of you that vapor forgot
This new fat form of perfumed materials
This amiable word it’s impossible for you to look at
Gasoline the color of rocks, rose
A scent that is soap appropriate
[18th Century Gold Boxes and Vanity Objects / 'Cultural guerrillas' cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop / We see in them something of his modest, retiring nature; something of his ardent patriotism / But what was Chopin to do in Paris, now that he was there? / That last remark lets us into the secret]
Not to be reproduced
not to be afraid of dogs
not to be missed in Manilla
not to ban armed drones
To build a fire
To be verbs
To be absent from the body
Lumbered and made luminous by
sign language
I want to be lucky in Japanese
Use the word innocence in a
sentence
Potato lake, daylight blooms
between
the rich sweetness of melons
wine and heat and bread
shapewear, fretboard,
condolence
a vanilla slipper chair
There are people who judge the
package
because it is so plain and comes in an aluminum bag
that you must cut first to take out the bottle
It has a sweet sour facet (lychee is that you?)
Send me a sample of liquid night
which actually suits me more with the wood on top
and the sweet discreetly shimmering behind it
An icy frostinged sky
its patterns on sale
barefoot in ginger and nutmeg
thick liquids, sugar
conversion, trivia
Does honey lighten your hair?
Tongue devils, their
aphrodisiac qualities
The big blue house says good
night
mud hens, toluene, monastery
Nepal
You are a minor judge of
warm season grasses, the
sensuality of cancers
Your Eskimo masks
The pig of god got up slowly
and walked away
Place death considering art
pantagraph
[We got an evening pass to the Louvre on a Friday and there was a very secret meeting place where one could do one’s mistress / americanism, britain, britishism, orlando, wizards, revelry, sunset, sentimental, design, detroit, paris]
rose lychee vanilla spiced
amber Chesapeake
lychee and rosewater martini
in your bergamot address book
disordered regulatory
authority
doesn’t matter, had sex anyway
explicit ex-boyfriends living
in attics
Explain this image
Explain it like I’m five, but
with molecules
wrap your body, we all float
down here
Keep this door locked
against secret wallpapered
invitations
This awkward silence makes me
crazy
There is a vain middleness to her wilds
the way she pastes herself to a perfume
Even the rocks are diligent and sincere with an internal
grudge
Facts eventually wear out
What exactly pastes perfume to culture?
Silence is a partial displacement
Which thing writes the duty of an ingredient?
Paris exceeds its own covert echoes, its symphonies, its shape
A confusion of selfishness encloses her in its amber
The result of a lychee-ed attention from a rose rich man
Soft vanillas function within their harms
[We fetch it from our neighbor's / We kindle it at home / We communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all (1733-06-20), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1880] / Use, do not abuse; the wise man arrange things so / The secret of being a bore is to tell everything]
The sun lyrics the world
Origin and yet destination
Our hands, our end, our
kitchen
From our shower to yours in
proper English
Our solar system, our skinny,
our skeleton
Our sky grows thicker when it
snows
Her tissues kept us warm
Skinwalkers
Whelps, lidocaine, needle,
flare
I for real had a man ask me,
"Did you just walk behind me?"
said "yes" and he said, " I wasn't sure
I just felt this light breeze and the most amazing smell all
at the same time"
Please God show me where that smell is coming from
She will steal your loyalty
It became dusty and plasticky
and disappeared from my skin too quickly
Powder cloud
Dying on meth, cooking fish,
losing weight, struck by lightening
Where’s my refund, Chuck
Norris?
Where’s my water? My
wheat belly?
Where are my Hebrew and
English wheels?
When will Excedrin be back on
the shelves?
When we say “You’re killing
me”
When we say “something gives
me energy”
When we say “an appliance uses
up electricity”
When we first find someone
whose weirdness falls into lyrics
I had no idea your chords
kissed
A first sampled honesty
[WHAT WE DO IS SECRET. ... DEATH CRASH; EXCLUSIVE / Car's performance largely remains a secret, yet we do know that there will be the 2013 Lotus Minicar concept first at the 2010 Paris Motor Show]
Horses, honor codes, openness
Of clay we are created full
text
She glows like a lottery
Which one is pink?
I need an orange juice can
Piano sheet music killers
I am lyrics in Spanish, in
dresses
The blue sky way in, I are, I
am
An impossible transformation, a suitable
freezing
Your dependence repulsed from the skin
skin from that thing-field
This, and then head-turning
from the profiles of these vapor people
Sometimes method will forget its own facts
they wear out into a new fat shape
The happy abandonment of procedure decreased it
The materials paste people to their perfume, like seasonal
directions
[A dream project for pedestrians, with endless secrets hidden away from all the wonderful clichés / A hidden “ feve” (enamel or plastic ornament) is baked inside / Get yourself invited to a secret dinner party / The palace we know today was largely designed under the reign of Louis XIV: the two splendid wings of the Cour]
It sucks to have subzero as a
roommate
A swell of apparel, a museum
tab
What does it mean when your
hand itches?
What does it mean if you dream
the devil bites you?
Whisper reviews wrapped in
cosmetics
She feels him close to furious
Her hair grows faster and the
ink on her crosswords
falls off the page
A styrofoam horseman costume
A concussion displays the
harmonies of Seven Up
An exorcist, a swallowing
strategy
Hall of fame mood quotes
Arsenic was discovered and ink
that you can only see with glasses
The faint smell of smoke,
flowers, the river
and faint smells of food, green, the streets, and the scent of
skin
Don't let the utilitarian packaging fool you, this is a
perfume for a siren
This one is all push-up bra, garter belts, and leather
over-the-knee boots
C'est un vin chaud en hiver
I'm having a little love affair with Dominique (or rather, his
creations)
I lived for a time in India, and a mix of
sandalwood, rose, lychee, vanilla and honey may be just as
likely to remind me of the smell outside an Indian
confectioner’s shop as of anything else
Tolu is my Kryptonite
Hindered prayers, you’ve been
copied from a webpage
You’re leaving poetry all
around you
A Las Vegas rape scene, or the
scene of an accident
Your narcissist legacy
A very old horse with enormous
wings
A vapor is a state of matter
that is also a vampire story
Trail of tears motorcycle ride
Rocket god injections, I’m a
cheerleader in Spanish
injections gone bad
Use “but in the end it doesn’t
really matter”
at the beginning of a sentence
[Opacity (Keeps upside, transfers downside to others, long a hidden option) / I vividly remember my long afternoon walks in the park du Luxembourg in the Latin Quarter in Paris, as I used to live across from it]
A token infinite
Dreams may come in the shape
of sportive tricks
Blood and dogs in theaters now
In the wakefulness of bikini
lyrics
Plasticville pleases you
You are a touch museum
Your relevant experience of
putting up peaches
What to do
What happened
What there is to complain
about
You eschew, you think
You’re sipping on after,
doveheart
What do your shoes say about
you?
You’re wearing your skin like
it’s too tight
Cardigans out of lyrics
Nothing but paint
Nothing but an apron
Nothing
No makeup, no socks
We are diligent and sincere in our
resentments toward
dreaming and vanity and materiality
Silence disappears and is replaced by a question
The symphony which makes Paris echo is secret
True care takes place
The lychee-ed rich man, his pink results
You when us (not honestly)
Dependence pushes into your skin
the skin a field that doesn’t properly explain possibility
A man adopts a principal reference, his profile is vaporous
his concessioned methods carried outside, but explained
New gross forms happy in their own procedures
Soft words impossible for you to see
like a provisioning musk
[In her family, “secret” is distinguished from “private” / Some guides don’t reveal some information because it is wise and caring not to do so / The older we are the more secrets we are given to refuse / We are idolaters of the Old / We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity / Long range—we do not want 800,000,000 living in angry isolation]
Decapitated bodies in Mexico
Decadent Hollywood poems
She is a wine extractor, an
almond paint color
She is feathered with apples
Symbols in an envious darkness
Sedimentation sewed onto her
seizures
Sensual individuation
The days were short, and he
spoke with his ukulele
If these angles were not
supplementary
Winter Sundays do not learn
from history
from some saggy private animal
parts
Already, you may be speculating
that this is the smell of lust, or perhaps fear?
Combine that with a bottle that’s 'too cool for school'
and you have a yourself a cult following
About three hours after application it occurred to me that
I was reminded of (YSL) cinema
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"
Make worksheets for the stars
that are most interesting to you
Pearls, broken droids
Are you interested?
Are the kidneys inferior to
the lungs? The liver?
Some friends turn into books
the kind of wind in India
her blue yoga memory quilt,
gun crosswords
[It was far too much to say openly: the secret of alchemy, and of science / in its nervousness and care / It’s more than I'd like to admit / We gingerly stepped down between the rails just off the end of a platform wondering what madness had possessed us to do so / Mint 1960's sprague unit, found hidden in the Paris Metro]
What kind of words start with
“y”?
Sentences find illusions
Words to describe someone,
that mean love, that describe
Halloween
that mean “nicely dressed”
What words end in J?
You sound smart
You sound intelligent
A man falls in love
People buy
You look thinner when you
sleep
Your heart might lead you to
an empty room
The muscles in your body
function as a race at night for no
reason
You carry your wife out of a
fire
and look archaic
Are dreams a wasteful medium?
Do they have certain specifications?
Note that perfume is acquired like culture
[If we had it to do over again, all four of us would do it differently / He died at Paris, France, on Oct 17, 1849, after a 10-year battle / The earliest work to display Chopinesque figurations as we know them today is the language set into the pages of a little journal that he kept secret to the end of his life]
You didn’t build my sunshine
Darkness is not your ally
There is beauty still left in
the numbers between 1 and 10
Think of a product you would
not purchase
Pelvic bones are a kind of
revolution
A person holds a bag filled
with teeth
and yawns a perfunctory
clockwork yawn
The honey adds a nice touch
but never does this perfume approach the brilliance of
Ropion's
Kenzo JUNGLE L'ELEPHANT. Désolée
I've passed this on to my youngest daughter
She sprays it on her pillow at night
which is brilliant because you see she's asleep before she
realizes
this whisper of a potion has all but vanished!
I never want to be without. Ever
She smells like creamy
apricots
Coconut, roses, bain de
soleil, cotton candy
Smells that please everyone
like soap or bedrooms
Her cell phone number was made
out of beach glass
Locust tree facts lounge
in their cream blush petal
candy
[Oh, the things Paris will do to a girl's morals, her broken hearted tangos / My God, I would never do anything to encourage Saigon not to come to the table / Most Parisians don't have huge closets / Always having secret fun, he died]
Publish your heart
and its heliotropisms
its architecture of memory
flowers
in toluene, milk foam
[Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist who lives in West Park, New York. She is the author of I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK, 2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008). She has collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also done extensive collaborations with artist and architect Scott Helmes and poet John Bloomberg-Rissman. She is co-editing with Sam Truitt an anthology of adventurous poetry from New York’s Hudson Valley called: In|Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line (Station Hill, Barrytown, NY, 2014). She curates the reading series Cadmium Text, which focuses on innovative writing from in and around New York’s Hudson Valley (www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com), and she co-curates the electronic poetry journal Peep/Show with poet Lynn Behrendt (www.peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com), a “taxonomic exercise in textual and visual seriality.” Images of her visual art can be found here: http://theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com/]
Copyright © 2013 by
Anne Gorrick, all rights reserved. This text may be used
and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of
Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication
of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the
notification of the journal and consent of the author.
