Fabergé's Egg

Switzerland, 1920

Dear Friend, “Called away” from my country,

I square the egg and put it in a letter

that all may read, gilding each word a little

so that touched, it yields to a secret

stirring, a small gold bird on a spring

suddenly appearing to sing a small song

of regret, elation, that overspills all private

bounds, although you ask, as I do, what now

do we sing to, sing for? Before the Great War,

I made a diamond-studded coach three inches high

with rock crystal windows and platinum wheels

to ceremoniously convey a speechless egg to Court.

All for a bored Czarina! My version of history

fantastic and revolutionary as I reduced the scale

to the hand-held dimensions of a fairy tale,

hiding tiny Imperial portraits and cameos

in eggs of pearl and bone. Little bonbons, caskets!

The old riddle of the chicken and the egg

is answered thus: in the Belle Epoque

of the imagination, the egg came first, containing,

as it does, both history and uncertainty, my excesses

inducing unrest among those too hungry to see

the bitter joke of an egg one cannot eat.

Oblique oddity, an egg is the most beautiful of all

beautiful forms, a box without corners

in which anything can be contained, anything

except Time, that old jeweler who laughed

when he set me ticking. Here, among the clocks

and watches of a country precisely ordered

and dying, I am not sorry, I do not apologize.

Three times I kiss you in memory

of that first Easter, that first white rising,

and send this message as if it could save you:

Even the present is dead. We must live now

in the future. Yours, Fabergé.

Source: Poetry (November 1988)