Incense matters, it means something, for only as long as you notice it. It's essentially ephemeral— more sensation, more duration than object. Even the smoke itself, the most visually striking aspect of incense, is gone nearly as soon as it arises from the burning stick until, mere minutes after ignition.
Incense is not dissimilar from certain acts of contemplation themselves. A fleeting idea, an unexpected insight, a powerful focus that disappears as soon as it's arrived, but leaves a small, magical trail in the mind.
Poet Kevin Craft captures it perfectly in his poem "Incense," which was published in 1997 in the journal Poetry. It's one our favorite descriptions not just of the snaking arc of smoke, the "frayed rope charmed out of ash," as he has it, but too how he puts his finger so aptly on the natural associations incense can conjure—his "scent of green mountains, wisp of the redolent middle of spring." Fittingly, in the final lines, he can't but but close on the spent stick itself, until, as it "burns down the length of its fuse."
Incense by Kevin Craft
Pungent filament,
finespun swirling line hung
in air, snaring
nothing in particular, conspicuous
as a live wire nonetheless:
how incense
holds sway,
climbing the narrow chimney of itself
only to
come undone
at the fluent end
of its own dominion,
giddy as s silkworm gone
sensationally astray. Here
is the frayed rope charmed out of ash,
here the nimble
melody of the flute—
featherweight aria
of aroma, the air's own
nom de plume.
Who will trace
this signature of smolder, who translate
the nomenclature of smell
as it permeates a room,
path of the supplicant's unhurried prayer?
For incense
is nothing if not
sweet time—
sandalwood, scent of green mountains, wisp
of the redolent
middle of spring—time
raveling in the deepest sense,
the amnesiac season
growing fragrant, accountable, as it burns
down the length of its fuse.
