This poem's called "On Friday in the fusty library." It begins in my car, going there. The radio was playing. On NPR was a science program about the Body Farm, which is in Virginia, I think. Bodies there are buried in strange ways, put in the ground with tubes sticking out of them, so that gases can escape and be identified by sensors. Stiffs give off a multitude of smells that have been identified through the years for pathalogical purposes, and to help train search dogs.
The interview was about a machine that can now do some of the dogs' job and one scientist's aspiration: to invent yet another machine, which might be able tell the difference between a rotting female and a rotting male, purely on the basis of smell.
It was with this subject matter in mind and thinking how grateful I was that our garbage had finally been picked up--a downside of crabbing is the stink--that I came upon a woman in the library who was incensed because she had ordered the "clean" version of a pop or rock CD and found the language in it still not clean enough for her taste. Because she had been exposed to "bad" words, there was now hell to pay all round.
Amid all the fuss I wished I could have connected up one of those tubes just for a minute, and changed the air in the library locally for long enough to give this woman a whiff of the body farm (or my crabs even), an olfactory glimpse of death.
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
