The Aroma

BY Nathaniel Tarn

Standing apart, invisible to all, and
yet beside the body of the beloved —
you may live from the aroma alone
like a divinity of ancient times
(subsisting on the odor of sacrifices:
burnt birds and calcinated bones).
You sorrow with the deepest sorrow
known: sorrow of everything passing,
the incapacity to reach out and touch,
frozen in memory on your stone root.

 

Biography

NATHANIEL TARN was born in Paris in 1928. His poetry was praised by Octavio Paz for its “rich temperament, a remarkable, linguistic inventiveness, and a vision both original and universal.” Tarn was a leading anthropologist for many years, and a pioneering translator of Pablo Neruda and Victor Segalen. He has published more than twenty books of poetry, essays, and translations — most recently The Embattled Lyric: Essays & Conversations in Poetics & Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 2007), Avia (Shearsman Books, 2008) and Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (New Directions, 2008).

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