The smell of Piteä.
I try to sleep in my goose down bed
at the Stadshotell, but
the smell assaults my nose just like when I was little
and my dad would announce on certain mornings,
if the wind was right or in this case wrong,
"It smells like Chillicothe," a paper mill town
way down the highway
from our house, and halfway
around the world from Piteä.
Wretched sulfur slicing through rotten eggs,
not quite the smell of dead rotting flesh,
but a loathsome, putrid, gagging air,
that seeps through pane glass, solid doors,
car windows…It never occurred to me
that this exotic land in Sweden would stink like my
not-exotic Chillicothe, Ohio.

Driving to Piteä from the airport in Oslo,
the June landscape blinds my eyes
with the brightness of midday azure.
The wildflowers blanket
needle green meadows,
and laundry-white liquid snow
crashes down hillsides,
bulging the rivers. The shimmering light
gives no clue, no warning,
of the olfactory attack up ahead;
treachery fouling-up beauty. Entering Piteä
I drive past an old cemetery of a Kyrka,
with black iron encircled crosses etched with names
like Stig, Carin, or Eric Degerman 1782 – 1867,
and it seems the whole town to be
ancient women with flowered bonnets,
and young men in suits riding bicycles.

Before the smell I longed to see
Midnight Sol halo around the horizon
all night; a night sky with no stars.
She never sets.
How do birds sleep?
I twist and turn in my bed,
and hear my dead mother say in a half-
dream of a visit with my sister
who lives in Chillicothe,
"After 3 days you won't notice the smell."

Behold! 3 days pass
and I walk the streets of Piteä
at midnight and yes – the birds sleep,
and Sol shimmers between
short buildings and tall pines,
thrusting her rays through the
circles on the crosses
marking the smell-free bones
of Stig and Carin and Eric,
yet she herself never touches
the Nine-Worlds…
    and I sleep.

 

© Conrad Reeder