1958 Plymouth Fury (Transfiguration)

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.
Whoever will be born must destroy a world
– Hermann Hesse

After they were married, which was just short of a miracle because she was frail and he was literary and eccentric, a city boy to her country girl, they defied the medical odds and conceived a little girl together, although the birth nearly killed the mother; just before she passed out into haze, she saw a large dark hawk pass over two eggs in a porcelain bowl. She lost their son later on. Fertility, so precious, so elusive. They held onto each other in the summer nights, him, a humidity, wrapping himself around her sudden night chills because she was ill, and her, clinging to him like a vine. Nervous, he purchased a car for them, drove them to Iowa. Blue bonnet blue, it rose up on the highway, stole time. A four door, its front grill marked with a V, and thin chrome lines, and a round silver bumper that gripped the entire car’s face. And a set of rear fins rising up like mountain-edged peaks with red, pendulum bell taillights. And a rear bumper that rose like a set of chrome elbows. Soon, the mother would die too. And the little girl in the back seat, innocent as a small cat, cracking eggs open all over the car’s seat. Each single egg, opaque, yellow, lush, with whorls of igniting light and amniotic fluid; a spirit-glow. Osmotic, undisguised, the fluid spilled through her fingers and across the car’s interior; it was migratory, transient, prosperous. She broke open each egg, let the clear fluid liquefy and spill. Watched in wonder at just how the fertile wetness spread, it roamed. The spirit: like an aqueduct, a flume, a channel and a groove where all that’s most holy arrives by sensual, tactile openings. The gentle couple talked on, oblivious, while the classical music station, on AM radio, played S. Rachmaninoff’s, The Bells.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of eight poetry collections. He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023.