Years ago I could have gotten away
with saying our love is like cinnamon,
cardamom and honey. Now you ask
what cinnamon is to me: define the taste
and smell without the word itself.
Halting the train of simile, you demand
an atomic science of experience, as is
your right. Until today a spice was indivisible,
a quantum of flavor, but now I reach
for other words. A burn on the tongue
unlike pepper, woodsmoke in the nose.
And warmth: but that’s just another
metaphor, the sense of a campfire’s heat
compared to something that happens
inside, heat that doesn’t consume.
And I’m still nowhere near answering
why cinnamon and sugar in quick bread
create the glow of home without any other sign
of the familiar, why its flavor speaks of the earth
in a way that peppermint doesn’t, but without
the dull weight of soil on the tongue.
Why it seems alive in a pot with chicken, cloves,
onions and pepper, alive as volatiles rushing out
when the spice jar opens. The first level
of biology, long before the molecular,
begins with the outlines of things, marking
the terrain covered by the species without
claims of how or why. Incapable of physics,
I’m a naturalist of our love, describing the shape,
but wanting to tell you how it was made.

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Image: “Pastries” by Kaleb