Long Playing Egg Poem

Eggs: Hard boiled. Olive Oil. Za’tar.

Song: “Depreston” by Courtney Barnett (from Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit)
apple music spotify

Poem: “Lucky Dragon” by Mary Ruefle (from The Book)

Lucky Dragon

God walked into the Lucky Dragon and, in a tired, half-dead voice,
ordered a Shanghai spring roll, wonton soup, steamed dumplings,
chicken fried rice, egg foo young, moo shu pork, sweet and sour
shrimp, and General Tso’s chicken. He loved everything, he ate ev-
erything, but the twelve fortune cookies that came after he did not
care for, so he folded them carefully into the dough of a dozen unborn
children, hoping for the best. While the staff remained watching from
the kitchen door, God walked out slowly, absolutely full, unable to
fly.

Notes: Home from California. Hard-boiled eggs in the fridge.

The eggs, the song, the poem: each seems simple.

Then it sneaks up on you. The deliciousness.

If Mary Ruefle’s mind were an egg, it would be Organic Pasture-Raised Grade A Large. Here she is in Madness, Rack, and Honey on art:

Isn’t all art irreverent? It is irreverent to create that which doesn’t exist; the newly made thing flies in the face of the already created and as such is based on negation (what already exits simply isn’t enough!), but born also out of the greatest reverence for what already is. When Borges, visiting the Sahara, picked up a little bit of sand, carried it in his hand and let it fall someplace else, he said, “I am modifying the Sahara,” and he wrote that this was one of the most significant memories of his stay. What Borges did is what we do when we write poems after millennia of poem writing. We aren’t saving the Sahara, we are modifying it, and you have to be irreverent to think you can modify the Sahara in the first place, and sincere in your attempt to do so.