A DOZEN FREE RANGE EGGS (SIZES MAY VARY) FOR CLARE TO COOK WITH Alasdair Middleton
A DOZEN FREE RANGE EGGS (SIZES MAY VARY) FOR CLARE TO COOK WITH Alasdair Middleton
For a piece created by Clare Whistler and Jen Mitas at Keats House, Hampstead, London on 2nd October 2005. Part of a series of eight gifts.
SCENE ONE On the night the moon hatched and its million white birds split the night sky with their whistling, the Tsarina wriggled her toes in her pearl crusted slippers and said; “This Is All My Fault.�
SCENE TWO The careless cook-maid, curst. She didn’t break the shells. Now the egg-hag rides In gondola’s of goose-eggs Across the grey Atlantics Of the careless cook-maid, curst.
SCENE THREE Higgledy Piggledy My black hen She lays eggs For Gentlemen. But she will not stir From her feathered torpor To lay for a lady Or some sorta pauper.
SCENE FOUR After the swan’s seduction; After the white wings, finally, finally, Had beaten to their climax on her breast; She stared with quizzical exhaustion At the two white eggs, Still warm from her body’s waters, Lying in the slow uncurling ferns. Two stars rise from one. Over the other hovers a flame.
SCENE FIVE He stooped, And plunged his naked hand into the snow, Through and down, Down to the hard, black earth And punched, Punched through and down To where the warmer soil fermented the promise of Spring. Stooping; Up to his elbow in earth, Up to his armpit in snow, Trembling, fingered for the tight, white incorruptibility, Felt and grasped; Grasped and lifted; Lifted up; Up and through the hard, black earth, Up and through the paralysing snow And held it, fragile, in his numbing palmA white egg, steaming slightly in the brittle Winter air. He never dreamt the egg would be so small. Then he clenched. The yolk spilt gold upon his shivering wrist. In the palace The ogre staggered And, groaning, Fell across his throne.
SCENE SIX She lived still. Lived within the mazes of her mansion; of Coramandel screens and cabinets; the caskets of dead lap-dogs and portly vases crusted with the folly of the East. Parrot houses whose squawking souls slipped into their silvered bars and assumed to painted heavens, their lacquered floors littered with the gaudy scrap of feather, beak and claw. Exotic trash. She lived still. And women whose daughters now were old remembered how as trembling debut antes they had taken tea from tiny porcelain handled by her fine and palsied fingers. Librarians and scholars looked askance when told the Regent’s mistress, Voltaire’s muse, De Sevigne’s accomplice, Johnson’s friend, Pope’s correspondent, Fragonard’s bedfellow, Montagu’s companion, Goethe’s foe, still lived. But she did. She lived still. At the centre of her mansion stood her prize, her cabinet, her museum, her journal du voyage, for she had travelled far. She had sailed in a pink shell to Cytherea and taken day excursions to the pretty isle of Lesbos; she sometimes spent the night. She had ridden rough-shod through Bohemia and, more than once, had been to Coventry. Here lay her plunder. The cabinet displayed her curiosities; the fossilised brain and Casanova’s letter;the blasted heart; the
fragment of the True Cross; the prehistoric fern and Mary Stuart’s earring; the embryo; the mermaid’s skeleton; the dodo’s egg. She’d gaze on these, and gazing she’d remember, Remember she lived still. Half a century before, in horror, she’d had black hung over all her mirrors and shattered any surface that might hold reflection. She would not witness time. But night would come, when itched by curiosity, she’d rise and wander to the centre of her labyrinth. Before the cabinet she lifts down the dodo’s egg and finds in its pale, bald form the affirmation that she seeks. Affirmation of her own existence, the simple affirmation of resemblance. In the egg she reads herself. The woman and the egg stare at themselves all through those nights where no clock chimes. She smiles at her self. She lives still.
SCENE SEVEN When the Siren suicidally leapt, Her pale and sodden promiscuity of flesh and fin and feather was swept (it loses in translation) by the never surfeited, ever luxurious sea Here to this bay Which to this day Still bears the Siren’s name, Partenope.
Some centuries later, The King of Naples, yes, the King of Naples, the never surfeited sea Starts to fit a bit, d’you see? Well, it does for me. Anyway - One day The King of Naples looked across the bay And said I’m going to build a castle here, this is just the place for me, This bay, Partenope. But no matter how many times the King of Naples built a castle, And it was quite a lot, The castle was always falling down. Did this please the King of Naples? It did not. It fell down, it was knocked down or it vanished in thin air. Now this would drive a lesser man to give up in despairBut not the King of Naples
Not he. He was going to build his castle there, Come what may, There on the bay Partenope. So the King of Naples went to the poet Virgil, Virgil’s buried up the road, by the way, Just out of town, Jonathan and I visited his tomb one day, It was nice, if not exactly what we’d thought, So the King of Naples went to the poet Virgil to ask the poet Virgil What he thought he, the King of Naples, ought To do about his castle falling down. And the poet Virgil said Build your castle on an egg. Build my castle on an egg? Build your castle on an egg. So he did. And it’s still there.
How do you build a castle on an egg? Don’t ask me. I am not the poet Virgil Nor the King of Naples. But it’s there on the bay Partenope. It’s still there. You can wander round Like Jonathan and me, The Castle Egg, The Siren, The Bay, Partenope.
Like I said It loses in translation.
SCENE EIGHT Across the hot rust hills A terror shrieked Then ululating slaves Bayed charms to cross The nightmare’s portent. The sullen daughter smirked A thin green snake Snide at her mother’s Slightest agony. Sweaty and grasping Inside the labyrinthine Chambers of the night The queen had dreamed.
A dappled egg She nested in her breast Had cracked and hatched A knot of snake. Fanged on her milkless nipple fatted upon her blood Curdled her flesh. The sullen daughter scrapes The rust from her father’s sword. The lost son, hearing the sea-birds shriek, Sets his compass for home.
SCENE NINE Answer a riddle with a riddle. Talk not to her of marble hall; Nor brag of the finesse of silken wall; Her eyes are brighter than the whitest milk; Her heart undazzled by a golden ball. Her fingers learnt to turn smallest key. She knows a worm which spins a finer silk. She bathes her body in more virgin milk, Which done, She hurls a golden ball into the sun.
SCENE TEN What sort of bird was the Night? In the beginning, they said, Was just Chaos And Night And Chaos trod the feathered Night, Beaks and talons and shrieking, Black rags of feathers falling, forever, forever. Then the Night laid an egg. The white egg shone in its dark nest of nothingness Its parents, chaos and Night, swooping and skryking around it Till the white egg trembled and cracked And a tiny, naked boy unbent himself into being. A tiny naked boy with wings and a bow And the boy was Love And Love made everything. Everything that was and is. Everything that was not Chaos or Night. That’s how it was, they said, In the beginning. O Chaos And Night O Love.
SCENE ELEVEN Reaching the age that longs for escape the country girl scanned her blank horizons And ran and ran and found escape elusive. Found she could dig or climbShe chose to climb. Found in its branches that the tree held nests – nests, eggs – Eggs which softly rang. Leaning her ear to the softly chiming futures She found escape, Deferred.
SCENE TWELVE Feeling beneath her feet the Earth’s shell crack, she squeezes her eyes tight against the hatching.
For a piece created by Clare Whistler and Jen Mitas at Keats House, Hampstead, London on 2nd October 2005. Part of a series of eight gifts.
Š Alasdair Middleton October 2005