Cheese Poem by gershon hepner

We are like cheese, without an inner life,
and lie within a fridge like Camembert,
Gruyère, or Stilton waiting for a knife
to liberate our fragrance to the air.
No one ever leaves a cat inside
the fridge because it’s feline and alive,
but living things like cheese we love to hide
where it is cold. Like cheese, we do not thrive
in places where our blood is heated by
the air that’s ambient, and amorously breathes
the odors that we have before we lie
in caskets, made more fragrant by our wreathes.
No Frenchman ever would put pongy cheese
into a fridge, because it seems they feel
a daily shower and deodorants won’t please
their lovers, who prefer them smelling real.
Perhaps the French who do not tend to shower
as frequently as we are paying homage
to odors that are sweeter than a flower
when they’re from unwashed bodies or from fromage.



Jack Hitt (“Does the Smell of Coffee Brewing Remind You of Your Mother? ” The New York Times Magazine, May 7,2000) discusses the work of Clotaire Rapaille, an anthropologist who is compiling a database of cultural codes that define Americans. Rapaille found that the smell of coffee reminds Americans of home because that is where coffee is brewed, is contrast to Europe, where coffee can be smelt on every block. “In France, ” he says, “the code for cheese is ‘alive’. It is young, mature, old cheese. You smell it to tell the age. When you go to America, cheese is ‘dead’. The first impression in America is that smell doesn’t matter. Cheese is put into the refrigerator. In France, never. You would not put the cat into the refrigerator because it is alive. But in America, in the refrigerator, in the morgue: you put cheese in plastic like a body bag. It is legally dead, and scientifically dead, by being pasteurized. The French company selling the cheese had a woman smelling the cheese, opening it, poking it, touching the Camembert. You could see the fingerprints on it. A love affair. Americans saw this commercial in a test and thought it was disgusting. Americans want safety. They want their cheese dead.”

5/7/00