That bummy smell you meet
off the escalator at Civic Center, right before
you turn onto McAllister,
seems to dwell there, disembodied,
on a shelf above the sidewalk.
The mad old lady with lizard skin
bent double
over her shopping cart
and trailing a cloud of pigeons
is nowhere in sight.
A pile of rags here and there
but no one underneath.
An invisible shrine
commemorating what?
Old mattresses and dusty flesh,
piss and puked-on overcoats, what?
Maybe death,
now there’ s a smell that likes to stick around.
You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns
and once
in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly,
after a bite of poundcake.
But here it lives,
cheek by jowl with McDonald’ s,
still robust after a night of wind
with its own dark little howdy-do
for the drunks and cops,
social workers and whores,
or the elderly couple from Zurich
leafing cooly through their guidebook.