Four Short Poems ~
Written/Narrated By New Jersey Poet Bill Wolak
Love Apples
For Elizabethans, the mere fragrance
of perfume seldom aroused
intimacy’s most erotic sentiments.
Rather, they craved the sultry,
pungent odor of rank sweat exuding
from the pores of a lover’s skin.
A whiff of the naked body’s
most unabashed aroma excited them
more then any artificial tincture
of musk and flowers.
To capture the unique scent
of her voluptuous flesh,
a woman would wedge
a peeled apple under her armpit
until her perspiration saturated it
with her unmistakable bouquet.
Then she would offer it to her lover
as an amorous keepsake—
a fleeting olfactory memento
of her body’s secret pleasures.
Love Tokens
In Japan during the Heian and subsequent periods,
prostitutes offered their most devoted customers
love tokens of their ink-black hair and cuttings
of their slender fingernails, which their admirers
carried in little pouches attached to their belts
or around their necks dangling close to the heart
like miraculous charms or wonder-working relics.
In order to please as many customers as possible
without depleting their indispensable beauty,
the prostitutes paid exorbitant prices to specialists
who stole the hair and fingernails off corpses
so that others could kiss and cherish them
as gifts that promised future happiness.
The Embrace
Geb, the earth god, loved
the sky goddess Nut.
When they embraced,
they pressed so desperately
against each other
that between them
nothing could exist.
So tightly did they writhe
together that even though
Nut was pregnant,
no space existed
where she could give birth
until her father Shu,
god of the air,
squeezed between
the lovers and held Nut
apart form Geb
creating the sky
into which all things
were created.
The Gift
The gift that most moved Jean-Jacques Rousseau
was presented by a messenger with a short note,
“Make a vest of this—my white, silk under-petticoat—
so that something that has touched me so intimately
might rest always near to your heart.”
After kissing the note and the petticoat of his lover,
Rousseau wrote back, “It is as if you have stripped yourself
naked before the entire world to clothe me.
I will wear your gift only to remind me how much
I long only for the time when once again we can undress.”