The Yoking of the Two Modes

St. Theresa fried eggs during her ecstasies.

Elemire Zolla

Unto us is given a billboard, its spaghetti the size

of transatlantic cable; in the depths of the entangled

weft of this behemothian pasta, passersby discern

the face of Jesus Christ, a face off keyrings and off

vigil candles,

now concernedly studious over the traffic jams of

Atlanta.

Unto us is given shadow and light, treebark

and shadow and light, and then the visage of The

Holy Mother

is born of bark and shadow and light, tenderly

confronting us from an otherwise shabbily

nondescript tree in the Bronx. And the egg. . . ?

In an 18th-century home-art shingle for JAMISON

POULTRY GOODS

the girl-near twelve, I'd guess-is candling one

at an orange flame the painter has made as solid

as a first-prize garlic (flinging teeth of garlic for units

of light). The mix of red in the orange is so ferocious,

her face is held by just a missing stroke or two of the

brush

from being visionary; as it is, the egg is one

of hundreds of eggs in a crudely-piled tumulus of

waiting eggs

behind her, and her face is more like something

turned into a tallying machine for this long,

ordinary labor. And yet the egg

in Piero della Francesca's Madonna and Child

with Saints and Angels Adored by Federigo da Montefeltro

is another representational

thing completely: symbolizing resurrection,

it hangs by a golden chain

above its otherworldly convocation,

like the highest, wholest note of soprano devotion

a castrato has provided from a hymn.

What's marriage? what's the Son of the Lord?-a perfect

the dream dreams. Unto us is given another fleabite day

amid the cattle dung and the stinking gums of the donkeys,

and here a tantalizing glimpse of the Celestial City

nonetheless takes shape in the tallowy afternoon heat.

Unto us is given a week of stacks of income tax

receipts,

and out of such fiduciary mulch who ever knows what

kishke-heaving zeals suddenly blossom? Can it happen

here, among the shots of rye and the brass spittoons,

as someone slurs "Look boys" and with a winking, thespian

exaggeration swallows a pickled egg whole? Yes, even

here it will crawl on its segmented belly, here

it will glow from its tail-gland and fan its amazing wings.

In the earliest Japanese myths, when Heaven and Earth

were not yet separated, when the In and the Yo were not

yet divided, "they formed a mass like an egg" -from this,

our Everything is created. Although it's only another

night

of chores for the girl in the farm's small candling shed.

It isn't fair! Her father's at the saloon

with his friends, his high-hat lowbrow friends,

her mother has taken the chaise to Pittfield. Now

it's candle one, then candle the next, then candle

the whole of history. She's lonely. She's that age

where sweetcream beats at your wrists instead of

blood,

and a dragonfly on fire is always stitching under your

breastbone.

Any more pressure, and she thinks she'd lift

like milkweed and go sailing on a breezy parabola

out of this life forever. But it's candle

the next . . . and then candle the next. . . . It's crazy.

We want to see God. We are given the egg in its fecal

tiara.