Your aunt’s blind dog Patsy turns corners in your sleep. Patsy felt

her way around, the way an egg will curl against the corner of a pan.

Now you doubt this is your memory at all, embraced and protected

in a thin carton of scrambled images. Move and the egg

spins inside of you. One turn with the spatula and the egg is fertilized

and may or may not marry the toast, since bread is noncommittal like that.

Mom told you this secret as she winked and sang about eggs. You wonder

about the spooky action between you and your mother’s egg

and whether you can present watery quantum physics talk

in a diner or anywhere without sounding ostentatious. You decide

there is no way. The bleak pocked dinge of home grown egg

looks like the surface of the moon, distant as the kitchen

in Kalamazoo which may or may not still be standing, a collapsed star.

The only egg inspired song you’ve heard about is Paul Simon’s

“Mother and Child Reunion,” based on an egg and chicken dish

in a New York Chinese restaurant, far away but coated in shell,

preserved and cradled. But it’s so bleak with the sun dripping within

a gray case of cloud, even with your mother’s sway and pink

formica counter with Hippies Use Side Door over the window.

The oval remains intact as you stare. The pictures sputter.

You think about the gruesome task of separating yolks and pray

this culinary disaster stops. Egg is nature’s perfect food, your mother

told you. She could flip an egg without using a spatula.

Every day was a miracle.