Smell is the sense we trust least with words, and rumsoup's "Scent" tries to put it into them anyway. Nothing in the poem says where the woman is, but the repeated cry, "How I wish, / I breathe her!", suggests she is not there. What we read is longing: a speaker rebuilding a person out of the traces she leaves in the air.
The most striking thing is the shape. The poem opens with three lines ("Her scent... / How I wish, / I breathe her!") and closes with the same three in reverse order. It works like a mirror, or like a breath drawn in and let out again. The reversal also changes the ending. At the start, the ellipsis after "Her scent" opens a door. At the close, the exclamation of desire comes second to last, and the poem's final sound is the same trailing-off dots. The excitement drains away and the wish is left unfulfilled. The speaker ends exactly where he began.
The grammar of that refrain is odd. Standard English would want "How I wish I could breathe her." Instead the poem drops the helping word and splits the line with a comma, so the wish and the act almost collapse into each other, as though "I breathe her" were already happening. Notice, too, that the verb takes "her" as its object, not "her scent." By the end of the first stanza-like unit, the woman has turned into air, something to be inhaled whole.
Between the frames, the poem moves through three points of contact: hair, skin, and a hug, each a step closer. Her hair smells "of peaches and orchids," a pairing of fruit and flower, something to eat and something to admire, which hints at appetite and tenderness at once. With the skin, the senses blur. The line begins with touch ("The touch of her skin") but continues "Of some pearl and satin," echoing the "Of" construction used for fragrance, as if skin could be smelled and a smell could be felt. Pearl and satin are smooth, cool and lustrous, and the alliterative "skin" and "satin" slide into each other. The small word "some" is telling: the speaker cannot pin the memory down and can only reach for the nearest comparison. Punctuation loosens here as well. There is no comma after "orchids," so the lines run on like impressions piling up faster than the speaker can sort them.
Then comes the surprise: the hug carries her perfume "like a glowstick." After peaches, orchids, pearl and satin, a plastic party toy is jarring, and some readers may find it clumsy. But it does real work. A glowstick shines in the dark, so the perfume becomes something visible, a light that radiates from her body. A glowstick is also snapped to life and fades by morning, which quietly fits a poem about something that cannot be held for long. The lines around it are a little awkward too ("all the perfume / Of hers"), and the possessive trailing onto the next line stretches the sentence the way a hug stretches a moment. The unpolished syntax reads more like feeling than carelessness.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The poem is free verse built from short, breathy lines, with the longest ones in the middle, where the speaker lingers over detail. Read aloud, the line breaks force small pauses, and the refrain sounds almost like inhaling.
What gives the poem its interest is how much it leaves out. We get no face, no voice, no name, and no story of how the two met or why she is gone. Everything comes through the senses closest to the body: smell and touch. In doing so it captures something true about memory, that an absent person often survives in fragments of sensation rather than in clear pictures. The circular structure makes the same point. The speaker keeps circling back to "Her scent...", and the poem never finds a way out of the wish.