“You taste like dust,” you told me.
“But clean dust, gray dust,
gritty but not dirty.”
How to respond?
It is good to taste of dust
that is not dirt, gray
but not brown, with texture
that, nonetheless, is somehow acceptable.
So I said, “You smell like a crow’s call,
dark and lingering and full
of some message from earth,
yet tainted by it, too.”
Then we fell asleep.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 