The Triumph Of The Egg

By Sherwood Anderson

                         In the fields

                         Seeds on the air floating.

                         In the towns

                         Black smoke for a shroud.

                         In my breast

                         Understanding awake.

                               -Mid American Chants

Tales are people who sit on the doorstep of the house of my mind.

It is cold outside and they sit waiting.

I look out at a window.

The tales have cold hands,

Their hands are freezing.

A short thickly-built tale arises and threshes his arms about.

His nose is red and he has two gold teeth.

There is an old female tale sitting hunched up in a cloak.

Many tales come to sit for a few moments on the doorstep

     and then go away.

It is too cold for them outside.

The street before the door of the house of my mind is

     filled with tales.

They murmur and cry out, they are dying of cold and hunger.

I am a helpless man--my hands tremble.

I should be sitting on a bench like a tailor.

I should be weaving warm cloth out of the threads of thought.

The tales should be clothed.

They are freezing on the doorstep of the house of my mind.

I am a helpless man--my hands tremble.

I feel in the darkness but cannot find the doorknob.

I look out at a window.

Many tales are dying in the street before the house of my mind.

The Triumph of the Egg Complete iBook

Red Meat

When I came home from work today, I checked the mailbox on my way to the front door. Hidden away amongst the mess of carpet cleaning fliers, coupons, a Vons ad, the Penny Saver, and various other dross by post, was a newsletter from the Poway Memorial Society. The cover featured a Grim Reaper standing in front of a cash register asking the question, ‘Do Funeral Prices Scare You To Death?’ Being that it was two days after my 49th birthday, I asked rhetorically, “Is this some kind of sick joke?” Or was it some kind of dire portent; a harbinger of my imminent demise? Did they know something? 

We sat down for dinner a while later. Steak and salad. I took my steak extra rare.

I ate the steak first… just in case.

Blood Metaphor

I always considered my car an extension of my home, especially when I went to work at a job I couldn’t stand. It was a refuge of sorts. A place to temporarily hide away from the tedium and boredom. There was a long artery that connected to the back of my car, stretching all the way back to the spot in front of my house where I parked.

It would serve as a place to catch a quick nap on those rare occasions when one just needs to fall asleep even for a few minutes of rejuvenation. It was a place to listen to the radio or get warm. A chair for transfusion. It kept me tethered to the life that I considered my real life, the real purpose of my life. It contrasted the non-career job that only served as a means to an end, to the home-life it helped provide; a vocational ground I suffered daily, painful, exsanguination. 

 

My car was the vehicle in which I would go, on most days, to pick up my kids from school and deliver us back to the nest, where we would patiently wait, engaging with our books and papers and things, for wife and mother to return as well. We would be reunited from the circadian scattering into the world. A familial coagulation. I felt as though I had been infused and made whole again.