This poem was written by Michael Ondaatje (the author of The English Patient) and is perhaps one of the most beautiful odes to love using our fifth sense as its lingua franca. A tale of love, longing and fulfillment by the hypothetical Cinnamon peeler. The use of cinnamon in this poem is Sri Lankan in origin, where Ondjaate was born.

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek

You could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you.

The blind would stumble certain of whom they approached.

Though you might bathe under the rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh at this smooth pasture neighbour to your hair or the crease that cuts your back. This ankle.

You will be known among strangers as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you before marriage never touch you– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.

I buried my hands in saffron, disguised them over smoking tar, helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once I touched you in the water and our bodies remained free, you could hold me and be blind of smell.

You climbed the bank and said this is how you touch other women the grass cutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter

And you searched your arms for the missing perfume and knew what good is it to be the lime burner’s daughter left with no trace

As if not spoken to in the act of love as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touched your belly to my hands in the dry air and said I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife. Smell me.

— Michael Ondaatje

Private Collection: Un Crime Exotique

– Michelyn Camen, Editor in Chief

I dedicate this poem to my huband to be Didier Cholay, who lives in all worlds at once. Didier loves spices; in his fragrance, food, and in his women 🙂 .

What is your favorite love sonnet and spice fragrance. (The best three comments, (feel free to write an ode to love or any fragrance with a cinnamon note ie Amouage, Aqaba, by kilian, DSH) will receive a sample of the cinnamon/spices fragrance of their choice from www..luckyscent.com and or www.indiescent.com. Draw closes May 31, 2011

All artwork is by one of my favorite erotic artists, Egon Schiele. The paintings and sketches certainly “smells” right juxstaposed with the sensual and erotic poem.

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal”.
Egon Schiele