Tom C. Hunley

God in the Cheese

Three Trappist monks from Gethsemane, Kentucky
      are being interviewed on Channel 6 news.
The monks make their living by making cheese,
      and their cheese is making them famous.
"How do you manage to make such wonderful cheese?" mumbles
      the newsman, his cheese-packed mouth grinning beatifically.
"We really put our souls into the process," says one.
      "Making cheese is a form of prayer for us," says the next.
"We find God in the cheese," says the third.

Right off I think of Hindus, who find not God but gods,
      and see the sacred not in processed cheese
but in the grazing cow itself. Hindu fakirs have stared
      at the sun and gone blind, and they've held their arms
above their heads until the arms withered, going to extremes
      because of their extreme hunger for enlightenment.
The news also makes me think of Richard of Chichester,
      disciplined medieval scholar, who shared a robe with two
            hovel-mates.
One would wear the robe and attend a lecture, while the others
      would stay in the hovel, freezing, strapped for cash,
starving students in the school of hunger, hankering for hunks
            of cheese.

All of this fills me with shame, because I'm watching the news
      on Channel 6 when I'm supposed to be studying with monkish
            rigor.
I do take consolation, though, in remembering Louis Pasteur,
      who taught us how to pasteurize cheeses and other perishable
            foods
because Napoleon III asked him to investigate diseases that were
            killing
      the Paris wine industry. See, before he invented pasteurization,
not to mention the anthrax and rabies vaccines, Louis Pasteur
            preferred
      the indolent occupations of fishing and painting to boning up
for his chemistry exams. Becoming more focused, he said,
      "In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared
            mind"
which is another way of saying "We find God in the cheese."

Thinking so much about cheese awakes a hunger in me.
      As I head towards my refrigerator, I think of the Salvation
            Army,
how the unshaven and unshowered, desperate for a meal, must sit
            through sermons
      before they may eat. After two hours on those hard pews,
            surely
they find God in the cheese. I open my refrigerator and find
      a forgotten block of pepperjack cheese. I turn it around,
looking for God in the cheese, and I realize there's a big difference
      between finding God in the cheese when you're making the
            cheese
and finding God in the cheese when you're eating the cheese,
      so I say a little prayer, "God, get out of there!"
as I camel my back and begin nosing and eyeballing the cheese.
      I really believe that He's there, but all I find is a coat of green
            and white mold.
As I throw the cheese in the garbage, I feel my chest swell up
            with sighs,
      and I watch the whole kitchen fill with the glow of my hunger.

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Originally printed in the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

Tom C. Hunley is an assistant professor of English at Western Kentucky University and the director of Steel Toe Books. His latest book is My Life as a Minor Character (Pecan Grove Press 2005), and his next book is Towards a Rhetoric of Poetry Writing Instruction (Multilingual Matters LTD. 2007). He recently published poems in Poetry East, Rhino, and River City.