Egg-bodies

(c) 2008

Lauren drew egg shaped bodies
One thin border separated the spheres
from white, unpopulated backgrounds.
With the painstaking exactitude
of a three-year-old who has not learned
to use a straight edge
Lauren drew hair lines, perhaps pins;
or arrows penetrating her boundaries.
I scoured for form and function for realism
and could never grasp that her art,
one step up from scribble,
sprung from the body-heart,
a primal architecture
not from head,
ould not get her
metamorphosing explanations
of these dramatic arms,
sun rays reaching and reaching
like multiple voices
from the heartof egg bodies.

Lauren said, “This is you”
handing Warren an egg.
It was too easy to assume t
he lines were a study of his beard a
nd we joked about this egg—at least—
not being bald.
For weeks Lauren drew radiating eggs,
strewing sheets throughout our apartment
prevalent as clouds above our parking lot,
common, not commonplace,
like the repeating patterns of ferns.
I imagined each was another
portrait of Warren,
that her wariness of his company
was appreciation
until the evening she blurted
she didn’t want him visiting
whenever daddy was away.

Lauren upturned her bowl of salad
over his head and giggled.
Warren’s head at last
was mimicry not model,
the bowl-end of the egg
green leaves like wilted,
un-carefully placed straw,
and her reaching out
was in a language even I understood.