“Your cum smells nice,” she told her paramour,
“like pear trees.”

“Like pear trees?” he replied,
“We get it, you’re a poet.”

Was he amused or irked? She wasn’t really paying attention.
A sunny-day feeling spreading though her,

she was thinking the likeness
typically moved from the other direction,

sidewalks redolent from ornament.

Known to her in childhood as popcorn trees
for their exuberant white,

the callery did not occur to her
in her first encounters with cum.

Then, in April, walking slowly
with a newly bruised heart,

the familiar spring smell hit her afresh,
now richer in meaning,

the ambient scent in several friends’ bedrooms
suddenly more specific, with narrative implication.

In fact, she wasn’t fond of the callery smell,
so why had she used it as a compliment?

This particular cum smelled more like linden,
which was sweeter, a smell she did like,

for soft evenings in early June.

She’d supposed he would be familiar
with the pear trees’ scent, maybe even the analogy,

but that didn’t explain why it seemed to her nicer
to say something already known.