Well Bottom Blues

Portmanteau   from ichor   “tenuous essence”
of cement   of tar   of exhaust particulate  
of sun-warmed highway in the rain

Scent of automobile obsessed America
where all the forests have been logged
out and replanted in plantation rows

Not petrichlor   earth blossom after rain
aroma of ground rising like a flower
out of the ground   invoked by storm

Petrichlor speaks to ancestral memory
turned earth   crops in the fields   rising
to the clouds as to the nurturing sun

* The title is a portmanteau word from ichor and tarmac, itself a portmanteau word from tar macadam, from Macadam, a British word for the innovation of a Scots engineer to lay a bed of crushed stone in a groove to make an all weather road

** Australian mineral chemists Isabel Joy Bear (born 1927) and Richard Grenfell Thomas (†1974) in “Nature of argillaceous odour,” Nature, vol. 201, No. 4923 (March 7, 1964), pp. 993-95. According to the authors, “The diverse nature of the host material has led us to propose the name ‘petrichor’ for this apparently unique odour which can be regarded as an ‘ichor’ or ‘tenuous essence’ derived from rock or stone.”