ODE TO SCRAMBLED EGGS


You would have been roosters or hens
confined to a small cage
or running around some yard.

Feathers, spine, a beak,
eyes like mine
that see night & day, stars, blue sky,
grains of soil & corn, wire mesh, trucks,
collisions intentional & otherwise,
with & of other chickens, hawks, ants,
woman’s hand or man’s,
a voice like mine, too, appetite & thirst,
urge to move, to reproduce, brood,
nurture, maybe—or strut & crow.

You would have been like me,
aspirations of smaller ambit,
probably less memory, less scheming,
less philosophical,
but troubled only briefly,
letting what happens go, fatalistic.

Scrambled eggs,
you’re like the elders of my family
I resisted emulating—
what they’d hoped for & attempted
scrambled by circumstances
stronger than their ability, finally, to cope with.

You’re like Abel, Akhenaten!
Samson, Goliath, Achilles!
Archimedes, Alcibiades!
Alexander the Great, the Gracchi!
Spartacus, Crassus, Pompey!
Julius Caesar, Antony, Cleopatra!
John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, Paul!
Umar, Uthman, Ali!
Richard the Lionhearted, Wallace!
Hamza Malmati Maqtul, Joan of Arc, Villon!
Moctezuma, Giordano Bruno, Anne Hutchinson!
Charles I, James II, Louis XVI, Pugachev!
Mozart, Tupac Amaru, Pontiac!
Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie Antoinette, Robespierre!
Alexander Hamilton, Shelley, Tecumseh!
Napoleon, Edgar Poe, Dred Scott, John Brown!
Lincoln, Maximilian of Mexico, Marx!
Sofya Perovskaya, Jim Fisk, Custer!
Crazy Horse, Rimbaud, Parnell!
Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi, Dreyfus!
Czolgosz, McKinley, Archduke Ferdinand!
Gavrilo Princip, Kerensky, Sun Yatsen, Zapata!
Kaiser Wilhelm, Czar Nicolai, Rosa Luxemburg!
Woodrow Wilson, Debs, Sacco & Vanzetti!
Garvey, Lorca, Al Capone, Vallejo, Trotsky!
Bonhoeffer, Insull, Amelia Earhart, Mussolini!
Hitler, Farouk, Naguib, Mosaddeq!
Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker!
Gary Powers, Jimmy Hoffa!
Howard Hughes, Batista, Lamumba!
Medgar Evers! The Kennedys, Lee Oswald!
Marilyn Monroe, Lenny Bruce! Che Guevara!
Malcolm X, Martin King, Salvador Allende!
Lyndon Johnson, John Lennon, Nixon!
The Gandhis! The Bhuttos! Sadat, Rabin!
Marcos, Gorbachev, Yeltsin!
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi!
Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein!
The unknown soldier!
The unknown salesman!
The unknown mother!
The unknown house-wife!
The unknown accountant!
The unknown cultivator!
The unknown husbandman!
The unknown tool-maker!
The unknown assembler!
The unknown installer!
The unknown maintainer!
The unknown loan officer!
The unknown waitress!
The unknown prisoner!
The unknown insurance processor!
The unknown student!
The unknown assistant!
The unknown ashamed of ailment’s symptoms!
The unknown without the price of membership!

Victims of every war,
famine, injustice, misunderstanding, plague.
You’re like my neighbors, generation, nation—
you’re like me.

Oh, some of us live longer,
emerge from egg or womb,
delight in early impressions
& in our mastery of, say, walking, talking,
maybe our art-work posted on a refrigerator
by encouraging parents or teachers,
might be elected senators,
or accumulate billions of dollars,
pounds of gold, barrels of oil,
maybe command
industrial-strength invasions, occupations,
or bands of resisters to invasions, occupations,
or take advantage of such conflicts
to trade at inflated prices,
committed, maybe, to some noble
or malthusian enterprise,
maybe dropping to one side like carcasses
of raccoons or squirrels along the road,
or mice in traps, or swatted flies,
or persisting, overcoming
one obstacle after another,
seeing the big, then bigger picture—
or running around some yard.

Scrambled just the same—
each a kind of team
opposed by not just another team
coming from the opposite direction
& dedicated to blocking our attempts to score—
but opposed by, say, 40,000 teams
coming from all directions,
each trying to score, & prevent our scoring—
most goals even of different natures
than our goals,
few understanding what we’re trying to achieve—
we so necessarily concentrating,
unable to conceive their goals—
even our understanding of our own
purposes & tactics
often scrambled by the necessity
of dealing with urgent entropy,
gravity, accidents, traditions, tantrums,
dangerous inclinations to disrupt
disproportionately powerful bullies,
others’ wise & foolish forays,
gambits, campaigns, policies,
our competitors subsidized,
laws biased for & against,
speeches sincere & realistic
or unrealistic, or cynical.

Addicted to products or services
giant corporations provide—
prices & terms changing,
barrage of sales & counter claims,
sly or unthinking,
intimate or impersonal betrayals,
capital seeking profitable transactions,
ecological havoc,
indignant protests,
planned & unplanned obsolescence,
illness & despair of those we care about,
our own griefs,
constitutions, bibles, seasons,
effects of hormones, viruses, age.

Tidal waves of change that began
a hundred, thousand, million years ago—
or are just starting,
our efforts a zealous part,
or against which we exert our efforts—
or which we don’t even realize encompass us—
til all we’re trying to do is disrupted, then done—
& we’re released:
& what we’ve done,
mixed with all that has become of us & it
has its great or slim yet inexorable effect—
oh, scrambled eggs.