Dear readers, firstly — apologies for my absence last week. I’ve recently been very busy at work and did not feel that I had something suitable for last week’s edition. Nor was I comfortable with the idea of throwing something out quickly to appease my publishing schedule.
Secondly, welcome to any new subscribers! It’s great to have you here, and I’m honoured to be able to share my writing with you :-)
This week’s poem is another poem that I started writing during a recent trip to Lisbon. It is a reflection on a certain perfume that my boyfriend has from the late 1990s or early 2000s called Green Boys O Botânico, which translates roughly as “the botanical [one]”. The perfume has a fragrant, fresh scent, with little complexity. I do not know anything about the history of O Botânico, nor was I able to find any images of the bottle on the internet. I don’t know when or how my boyfriend acquired it and I’m not sure that he remembers either. I imagine Green Boys O Botânico is no longer produced, and so the small amount that my boyfriend has left — which reduces over time, due to evaporation, due to usage, becoming more concentrated and intense over the years — that this residue is a sort of evanescent time capsule. The perfume will run out one day and we will only have the memory of it to go by.
Each time we visit Lisbon, where my partner grew up, and where his mother still lives, I have a habit of wearing some of Green Boys O Botânico. For a dinner with friends or a night out, when I am wearing smarter clothes than usual, making an effort; play-acting at adulthood. I once spilled the bottle and carelessly reduced the time capsule’s length by what I imagine must have been several years, the liquid running over the marble counter.
I never wore perfume growing up — by contrast, it is practically a given that every young man who grows up in Portugal owns several different bottles of scent — scent is the very definition of manhood — and when I apply Green Boys O Botânico to my wrists and my neck, I often have the sense that it is in excess, that I take too much. The materiality of the scent is almost alarming for me. It seems to stand in such strong contrast with the delicacy and subtlety associated with our sense of smell. Although Green Boys is a simple scent — one my partner wore as a young teenager, but only rarely nowadays — it almost feels too much to me; too direct, too intense, too present. Far from nostalgic, its presence is heady and immediate, an Iberian garden coming alive at night.
Today’s poem is entitled The Garden.
THE GARDEN Before I left Lisbon I put on some of your scent, Green Boys O Botânico, roughly “The Botanical” from 1995 as if the night were a vast green garden I was in fact taking off into and not fleeing from. Yesterday we visited one of my favourite places O Jardim do Principe Real, The garden of the Royal Prince, and discovered for the first time a huge old reservoir buried improbably beneath the fountain in the park, deep and empty as a mould or a mouth without a tongue. And we thought — could we be its sculpture, the reservoir, its cathedral or catastrophe poured in wet? It was cold beneath the soil, and we did not fuck. We looked at the artwork they had on display down there and it reminded us what it was like to be together and afterwards we went back to your mum’s and made popcorn and watched a scary film and you held me through all of the jump scares I had been a stranger to your warmth recently and when I reached for the perfume bottle before I left Lisbon I was thinking of all the times I had smelled it, felt it close against your skin more intimate than a lover. And now the perfume holds itself as fragile on my own skin as the pages of an ancient manuscript I am being taught the syntax for, in a library where it's too late and the books have already caught fire.