Martin Figura & Helen Ivory
Although there’s only a dozen of us, we constitute a crowd
in Hum, the smallest town in the world. Our bellies are full
of Pašticada, our complimentary tote bags weighted with olive oil,
trinkets and the local spirit as we head back through
the narrow stone streets and alleys to our little bus.
Midway through The Annunciation, the angel is all travel; is lifting itself from the wall of the chapel spurning the embodiment of paint. As if pigment alone could explain such light, as if the movement of pig bristle across a lime-washed wall is any way holy enough!
A ginger cat blazes from shadow into a beam of light
at the foot of the tower of the Church of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our guide spits three times
into the dust and crosses herself.
The afternoon unpacks itself as any such afternoon might. The clocktower holds time like an offering above the heads of the assembled. The cat clears its throat,
the prey, an egg, delicately falls from her teeth to the flagstone
and cracks. We become a congregation to a slow ceremony:
the separation of the albumen and the yolk. The cat draws
the albumen away with a deliberate claw, as she might the entrails
of a mouse torn asunder. The yolk is precious and bright as a chalice;
the cat presents her rough little tongue and closes her eyes.
The mountain air is cool as flint in the shade. A cat is a cat but also the sun. Its orange fur, the orange yolk, a balm for the eye. It casts a glance at the shadow cat, a monster spilled up the stones of the church.
The shadow cat only has eyes for the egg; for the sun it devours. Its ears spike to the sound of the spit, spit, spit of countermagic.
The lick of the yolk is ferocious and quick, the work of a thief
in fear of discovery. We the spellbound, and the buzzard above us,
worth no more than a contemptuous glance. Then the luxurious
cleansing, fur stripped of its claggy dribbles before her stretch of sleep.
Our impatient guide herds us, a dozen writers to the bus
for our bumpy decent. We are secretive, suspicious, wishing
the mysterious treasure: the cat and the egg to be ours alone.
In the Church, a broom has been busy mingling skin cells and plaster painted with the angel‘s colours. An almost- triangle of dust is swept to a corner and each time the heavy door opens, the air shifts it along.
A woman bends down to read the dust and sees an egg shape, a tideline, the fingers of a baby curled round a silver rattle.
At the end of the festival, we clumsily hug and vow to stay in touch.
Each of our notebooks contains ‘HUM CAT EGG’ written in our own language.
A sheet of parchment sits alone on a table at the end of a dimly lit corridor. Symbols press through from the other side but they are impossible to decipher from here.
One of us has coloured in the outline of an egg with an orange Sharpie
and drawn on it, the face of a cat. Safe in our economy seats, we begin
to wonder what can it possibly mean, as we soar away through the clouds.
Reading the sky requires as much cunning as divination with egg shells or divining your fortune in the patterns of a palmful of dust.
From here, that cloud looks like the face of a cat, that one has the trumpet of a heralding angel, this one is the shape of an eggshell cracked down the middle. The sun pours through the belly of the sky like yolk.
In our absence, the albumen slowly hardens in the sun
to blank white, lies expressionless until a scavenging dog
gobbles it up; leaves no trace of what took place.
The painter mixes egg yolk with pigment and fills in part of the missing angel. Wings are married to flesh; the sentence re-expressed. The assembled hold ear trumpets to the sky and open their ears. For as long as they dare, each stills their breathing, which had become a noisy encumbrance.
Far, far away words tippity tap on to keyboards
as if it really did happen: the cat and the egg.
Only there are so many inconsistencies between
the told tales, no one can be believed.
Martin Figura
Helen Ivory
Commissioned for a performance at The National Centre for Writing, Dragon Hall, Norwich as part of the European Poetry Festival
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