To Venus

Flowers, round and soft and

running over with

a smell more like a taste, or

Have you ever felt a smell?

Let it ring or ripple or wander across

your skin,

part your lips.

And though the fingers you touch with

are themselves endlessly soft, sensitive,

the feeling of

this smell

breaks open everything you thought possible

about softness

about eagerness and the way joy

couldn’t possibly but somehow is

filling each cell of your being.

And when my nose left that flower,

the color and quality of light slipping into memory,

the smell

is still with me, even now.

That is the kind of beauty that calls me.

That is the kind of beauty

that changes the world.

Have you ever felt beauty like that?