the egg in white

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incendio_s

In a daydream I attended
an exponential function
hosted by his eminence,
the summit of his self creation;
close acquaintances only, commonality
reassured in glyphic communication.

His hacienda was mostly atria,
potted green, and rain washed
marble chessboards where gardeners
wearing chefs’ hats offered fertilizer
and entrées.

Memories if compressed by force
achieve solidity, quite attractive
although immobilized,
he told me, and took me on a tour.

~/~

Beneath a shade cloth willow,
a selected group debated lies and fantasy,
with whiskey, ice and me,
wound in a Roman bedsheet,
a little nervous in such brightly illustrated company.

At a certain unremarkable moment,
his eminence leant towards me sotto voce:

The magic of my youth has left me,
its cicadas and ephemeral smoke.
Once I fell in love with a vagrant light,
a luminous firefly, and now
I seek a book she wrote
about verity, magic and myrrh—
The Egg in White.
Might you help me in my quest?

I feigned a degree of contemplation,
looked up into the windy sky
where a storm of truth was brewing,
and dissembled with a flourish of my glass.

An Isley single malt if I’m not mistaken.
Do you mean magic magic or just plain magic?
Might this egg have been instead a pale
amber shade, and within, the ashes of a phoenix?
And which came first, the book or the egg?

After sunset I observed the other guests—
they didn’t leave, they found their places
in the corridors
or on the plinths in alcoves.

Each returned to a static life,
each no more than
a cobwebbed recollection
of his eminence.

about
It is easier to judge the mind of a man by his questions rather than his answers, Pierre-Marc-Gaston, Duc de Lévis, 1808; the phoenix  in ancient Egyptian mythology.

tangential
My longish poem “When We Were Young” will appear later this year in an issue of Mithila Review, an international speculative arts and culture magazine.  Continues →

artwork
incêndio, flammable memories

 

36 thoughts on “the egg in white”

      • i am a persistent breaker of that rule. i always write with a purpose. i am a fastidious editor, so it is inevitable i see multiple possibilities.
        that is something i have experienced: people have assumed i’ll be the same person they knew me as, & having changed it is baffling to them that i wouldn’t respond as they expect. i don’t believe in a rigid persona, as we sup experiences, we change, & may not realize, but we do. i don’t blame someone for thinking i’d be the same, people don’t know any different. we are so comfortable curating a persona we don’t note the alterations. There’s Tom Waits song with a lyric something like “i never missed home until i was away for a long time” (i paraphrase) i think the sentiment is similar to what i said above.

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        • I know what you mean, no change = security but no-one has a choice. I used to think I was this person or that person but after years of Buddhism, although I haven’t mastered emptiness, I’ve come to appreciate re-creation, how we recreate ourselves day by day, and being a little chameleonic isn’t a bad thing either.

          Liked by 1 person

      • Thanks Candy. You’re right. Funny thing is I wasn’t thinking of that at all. It’s just a tangle of familiar places/events in Latin America with domestic workers and so on. The chessboard reference is actually black and white marble floor tiling.

        I think everything comes from memory in the end, unless you have true otherworldly visions 🙂 , same for Lewis Carroll I suppose.

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