The Beautiful Cheesemonger by John Poch

Loving even the old cobblestones in this ancient town, I am a tourist at the Tuesday morning market, and she is proud to tell me that this is the cheese preferred by all the French. She pulls a wire through it. A wire! I take from her hand this bite-size wedge, and I cannot stop tasting the slightest sweet smoke of apricots and young sex. Oui, oui, I say. Her subtlest smile is a wire that cuts this moment from all my history.

However, one step to her left she directs me to two other giant wheels of cheese and says a secret in her best English. These are Basque cheeses. This one is from a young shepherd across a hillside past that mountain. And that one is from an old shepherd a little farther past. The same kind of sheep, she says. She shows us a snapshot of a very hairy sheep. The cheese wheels before us are nearly the same in look and taste, but then, slowing down time as we can do only when we are in love, I can taste the difference, the tenderest crystal texture dissolving on my tongue, the more patient craving for wine and bread that the old shepherd knows, his love of a subtle honey made by bees kept in autumn near an abandoned pear orchard where the sweet rot of fallen fruit sings like Orpheus in pain. The smell of his old barn and old wood is in the cheese, and a fast clean stream and the afternoon shadows of garden tools and horse tack. The young shepherd has all this to learn, though he is not far.

The beautiful woman, however, may very well love him—I can tell by her eyes that shine like live little brown fish and the way she stands equally between the two wheels as if to deny a preference, as if poetry were the same as a poem—believes that the young shepherd might learn all he needs to know in time. Though I know there is no promise of time to anyone on earth, I can still love her for this fault.

The old shepherd loves all of us.

John Poch has published fiction in The Sun, Carolina Quarterly, Hopkins Review, and other journals. His most recent book, Texases, was published in 2019 by WordFarm. He is a professor in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University.