Eggs

My friend, who last June became a father, visited recently on an invitation for coffee and found himself ambushed with a poem:

“Egg,” by C.G. Hanzlicek

I’m scrambling eggs for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.

I remember the appreciation his voice found in the last three lines. Together we wondered what gave them their force. Principally, I think it’s the sudden telescopic collapse of scale: from the speaker’s total love of his daughter into the simple serving of an egg.

It’s the preparation of this same egg that opens the poem. The poem’s structure, then, mirrors its message. The speaker meditates upon the happiness he’s found in fatherhood and wedded love, and the power they have to transform and give dimension to even the smallest features of daily life. These considerations, though, begin with the egg and his daughter’s question, to which she herself provides the answer in receiving the egg at the poem’s end. Grand and universal themes unfold from, and then return to, what is after all a mundane, quotidian routine.

In respect of which, it is striking to see how much the poem operates like a photograph. Not every photograph works this way, of course, but the ones I care about tend to, and it’s as near as I’ve come to a single reason for loving photographs: the capacity to find and show the large in the small, to find meaning in the literal and mundane merely through a choice in perspective (see David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” for an oration on the daily importance of this principle). It’s not as academic as it sounds. Anyone has experienced it who has studied the snapshot of a loved one and perceived in that picture a summation of the person.

Edward Weston wrote of transcendance in his journals while photographing bell peppers: “It is classic, completely satisfying—a pepper—but more than a pepper: abstract, in that it is completely outside subject matter.” Those photographs fix the large and the small—here the abstract and the concrete—upon the same plane, and the image resonates with the tension of opposing polarities delicately balanced. It’s as though Weston drew together the ends of a giant magnet: a nudge in any direction and they should go shooting far apart: we would be left with either just a bell pepper, or just an abstraction.

Pepper, 1930 (30P), by Edward Weston

I’d identified this feat primarily with photography, but the last lines of Hanzlicek’s poem—their collapse of one end of the scale upon the other—achieve a similar sensation of glimpsing the connection between those opposing poles.  If we need a name for this device, it would be hard to do better than Hanzlicek’s own symbology, for it reports the coincidence of literal simplicty and unbounded potential.

In what artworks, then, have you found an egg?