The Egg by B.T. Joy

  This morning slicing
slices of bread into equal halves.
Half-five and the light
not yet flinging its handfuls
of yellow rice on the fox-worried roads
  I took two eggs and cracked them in a bowl.
The second yolk spilled greasy as the late ball
of a sun on still white clouds. And round the half sphere
of her rim, where goldenness should have met with albumen,
clung a crescent of some darker substance:
  two spots of blood in a yellow orb
lit by light off curves china. Half-five
and dark as Glasgow ever was. I fetched the whisk
and whisked a slurry from what hatched out: from yolk
and white and birdish points of unborn tissue.
  Hurairah tells us certain acts
cause a black spot to form in the heart
or likens the soul to a mirror
to which worldliness is a stain
and remembrance a wax for polishing.
  Think of it as the spore of a wart
that wheedles its jagged roughness
under ridges in the skin.
Or how the human face sometimes
develops blemishes for want of soap and water.
  Or consider me, worldly and often forgetful,
so dubious concerning sin and ever mindful
of all the good lives that word has stunted.
How I ate the egg and the bread, one soaked into the other,
two matters sharing a single light brown form
  and somewhere in it all I swallowed, with compassion,
two dark spots of the smallest sin; nestled within
a circle of golden promise. I ate
and drank stewed tea and readied for the day. Knowing
that the sin of the egg was a sin I shared:
  I too once swam in mindless ecstasy. You can still
feel it sometimes. When you’re close to love or close to sleep.
A stillness too deep for any poem. And yet I too laid down
a clot of blood on the unfamiliar earth. I too left home;
swearing never to return.