Everything   If failure has a certain smell, we might expect putrescence, primal rot that stings the senses, shrieks Go away! But at night   it’s different — sorrowful, sickly sweet, mistakable for better. Morning light, though, makes it all seem worse — burning tires, streets   filled with stinking garbage and wind that brings the stench home — rancid, foul, mephitic, beat — bad enough that failure taints everything.   But what if everything smells of success — after the snow, the first faint whiff of springtime rising from the hayfields, or the blessing   of an unexpected victory — maybe a bakery back in business in a liberated town, a pine tree   that made it through the storm, the still-wet ink on a long-sought treaty, fair winds at sea — why not all of creation, everything?   And it’s everywhere — the smell of existence, whether we like it or not — it clings to all that lives and dies, even the mystery   of space (said to savor of strawberries), stone tombs that smell like time, death-kissed carcasses, the crowns of babies’ heads, raucous   bacchanals reeking of wine comingled with desire, electrical fires, rock & roll ecstasies, toadstools, everything.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont August 2021