Amy brings in an egg
from the coop, it’s warm,
slightly speckled, dotted
with dimples. She shows
me how to candle
an egg, takes me to a dark
room, holds it near the candle’s lit
wick, the scene
is like an oil painting
I saw in the Vatican, a woman
covering a flame from view,
her hand glowing against dark–
tenebroso–vessels, muscle,
and bone in red-orange skin.
Here–light births shadow,
through the calcite orb’s shell,
she points to tributaries–spidery
veins, two bulls-eyed yolks,
a set of germinated cells.
I am reminded that a Catholic priest
first proposed this origin of the universe–
God’s single cosmic egg hatching
all energy and matter, but now
scientists calculate the physics of multiverses,
universes cracked open side by side–
innumerable eggs.
But how could two survive,
breathe inside this single egg?
Amy’s face is half lit, her smile unfurls,
It’s noon in August. On the eastern
horizon a broody first quarter
moon begins waning,
to shrink away from the light.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 3.
Claudine R. Moreau was born near Michigan’s Saginaw Bay, but was raised in the coal mining country of southwestern Pennsylvania. She is the author of Demise of Pangaea (Main Street Rag 2024) and Dark Machines (Fugitive Poets Press 2012). Now residing in North Carolina, Moreau teaches physics and astronomy at Elon University. Her work has appeared in Chaotic Merge, The Pinch, PANK, and Tar River Poetry, among others.
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