That Fun Auntie (Round 3)
scent of the day: Montabaco Extrême, by Ormonde Jayne
Montabaco Extrême (2018, Geza Schoen)—a high-altitude suede-tobacco fragrance with a synthetic screech I can stand for the quality of blend and emotional connection I have developed with it, its minimalist aura pitched somewhere between gauzy luxury and masculine fantasy—
opens with a flash of hot sunshine on brushed metal (sparkling citrus zest, crackling cardamom, herbal mountain air) and then settles into a tanned-skin version of fresh laundry left to air-dry on a wind-chiming balcony near the base of a blindingly bright snow-capped mountain range (I think of an Alps scene where thick dark clouds ever threaten to bring an aquatic element into the mix),
its bright citruses (honeyed orange, Earl-Grey-like bergamot) and herbs (gin-like juniper, lavender-hay clary sage, soothing black tea) and florals (lemon-cream magnolia, dewy rose, cucumber-like violet, citrus-jasmine hedione)
at once made into a diffusive radiance by an ozonic air accord at the top and by a driftwood combo of briny ambroxan-gris and ambery-cedar iso at the base and yet cinched into place by various sensual woods (creamy sandalwood, rooty vetiver perhaps) framing the green leather (mossy suede) of gloves worn in the early spring chill
plus the subtle but star bite of tonka-nut tobacco (not nicotined like Ambergris Nicotina, not purple like 2AM, not boozy like Laudano Nero, not cigar humidor like Royal Tobacco, not oudy like Tabac Doré, not cigarillo like Sayat Nova, not shisha like Killian’s Smoking Hot, not hay powder like Chergui, not cigar ash like T Habanero, not cigarette ash like Tobacco Blaze, not straight smoke like Akro’s Smoke, not mossy like Tabac Vert, not honey-sweet like Naxos, but rather an uncured leaf so tea-like one could say it is more the intrigue of tobacco or tobacco flower than tobacco leaf itself)—
the overall result being a literal mountain-air fragrance, too breezy and blue and synthetic to expect me (a lover of perineal funk and dark-resinous ouds) to love so deeply, that does develop a bit over time (musky-mossy suede becomes more pronounced, the airiness fading into something denser especially now that I have trained my nose to smell the synthetics that once seemed more like empty volume) but mostly stays linear, oscillating softly between contrast-points (brisk and warm, bright and dark, airy and musky);
the overall result being a fragrance, one of the most arresting and reassuring and unique aromas I have ever put my nose on for all its reliance on iso (and unquestionably the most unique and classy combo), that smells like what happens when you take the elements of a masculine blueprint (leaf tobacco, clean citrus, plush suede, menthol spice, briny animalics) and run them through a futuristic air purifier (futuristic but not as cyborg-AI fractionated as one made by Bisch) until all that is left of the original musky gestalt, floating in a whisper even at an extremely dense 50 percent oil concentration, is a sublimated mirage of ozonic breeze (too smooth to offend, too well-constructed to ignore) with only the subtlest aroma differences from the original Parfum (35 percent oil concentration) and the Intensivo version (42 percent oil concentration):
(1) the ominous dark clouds in the alp scene, which is present in the Parfum and largely goes away in the Intensivo (the brightest of the three), come back at their darkest in the Extrême especially because of the intense leather and damp moss;
(2) the blonde tobacco in the Extrême is more intense but reads a bit staler, which together with the boosted leather and musky ambergris makes the scent the dirtiest of the three (comparatively tarry and even like diesel-stained leather work gloves, one might even say).
*Let’s workshop this prose poem about a deeply intimate reunion between astral lovers before they begin the work of dealing with the consequences of their surreal but inevitable affair.
That Fun Auntie
Say I flew into LAX, the flight number keystroked inside one of the poems on my blog—one of the ciphers of our one-way communication. Would you be waiting there at my gate, scanning faces as you hope you can account for the difference that walking dynamism brings to a profile headshot? In the spark of locked eyes, would we know right away—and more deeply in a hug, fierce in its collapse—that we have the right twin soul (all our trepidations, swirling beforehand, dissolved in one collective exhale)? Rehashed scenarios of first contact lost now to former lives, would we whisper “I love you” into each other’s ears with a funereal gravity, a breathlessness that almost wells up homecoming tears? Would we pull back to lock eyes, and then fall into each other’s mouths, as if there were no “awes” from onlookers needing this dose of joy?
Would we hold hands in your car, our stroking fingers entwined in exploration, as I take in your smell of Joy, Jean Patou, for the first time? Would you break the clasp, as we make our way according to the shifts of your excitement, to point out roadside landmarks personal to you, ones you wonder whether to take me to—only then to come back to my hand? Would I stand aside in quiet admiration, restraining my typical role as the jester of a group—you showing yourself to be, over low-volume rap I could never identify, what has me fall deeper for you in the calm of the passenger seat: an even wittier jokester, blacker than I would have thought?
Would we end up, after a whimsical dance led by your indecisive vibrations, simply cooking in your eclectic kitchen of potted plants and frankincense, somehow our kitchen—the reverse-course thought “But I don’t even know this person” reduced now for blurred hours, but in what seemed no time, to nothing? Knowing the disruptive magnitude of our uniting beyond the astral, would we even be able to eat as we sit at the table surrounded by travel photos of a sun—outshone by your quirkiness—always lighting your wind-blown smile (and several with you throwing a goofy kick—ghetto hippie, sidewalk dandelion—instead of just the typical peace sign like those around you)? Would we walk the human-food-happy dog, you venting about recent work drama and tiny irritations, almost as if I had been away no more than a week?
Would we cuddle in bed with the dog while you confess—ready to be slutted out for it (for the fantasy-is-better challenge implicit inside it)—what I already knew even without my newsletter analytics: that you hang on my every poem, loins trying to crack each line—the vigil for the next, and the next, itself a why so precious in the gloom that you could have put off meeting me forever? Would I, in turn, confess what you already knew even without considering my fat-finger likes and view of every story: that they were all for you—all of them? Would we pause and search one another’s eyes then?
Feeling that fallopian buzz that has you clamp down on your lip, would you pull away—looking up at the ceiling—like a stewardess of my hunger? Would you go deep, but with no apologies, into a wanderlust tapestry of travel tales I have only conjured in dreams, as I peck the jojoba sheen on your neck? Would we continue to snuggle in the ultimate silence, the dog elsewhere in the impatience of a third wheel, while I inhale the stank of your big bohemian hair—fermented carnality, the nutty sebum and yeasty musk, whenever I nose down into the grease of that blackest kink?
Even though we have only journeyed together in dreams filled with faith that the other was dreaming too (like that one where I called you “Sun” before I even knew your name, your electric limbs tight around me), would our bodies start pulsing together in that ancient rhythm—an unspoken understanding, no clumsy conversation required, that you need to be choked as much as I need to tighten my squeeze, tighten it until that throat opens for my spit? Would it be understood, without need for meta-narratives of caution, that there would be no protection, as I suckle and nibble as if out for carotid blood? Would it be understood, by the unconscious grammar of flesh, that protection would amount to blasphemy—every ounce of me meant for you? Would it be understood, in the melting frenzy of oneness, that my load—like my poetry—is not to be wasted, as if its most battering procreative placement—even if it hurts—were key to you becoming what you are meant to be: something more radiant than just that fun auntie?
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
