Last Suppers

PETER WALDOR

Once when even your mother’s breasts
would not console you, crying, screaming,
I took pity on the others at the old hotel
and in the middle of the night carried you off
into the forest. In a bog we heard a bull frog,
its voice deeper than the deepest baritone’s deepest hum.
After three or four blasts you stopped crying and slept.
And now a few years later, with scalpel
you slice the white belly of a dead frog, pull out
the dark stomach and slice it as well,
and pull out a baby crawdad claw. You hold it up
and test its still good mechanical actions
and poke its tip on your fingertip, in your mind
the image of a rocky shore and the moment
before the last terrible moment and the last
terrible moment and then a man whose face
you cannot see wading in with hip waders,
sweeping the frog up in his net just as it was enjoying
its last supper. He calculates another 75 cents
added to the great but not great enough collection;
and still holding up the claw in the light,
neither of us with any ideas about what happened
to the great spirit that once inhabited it
as it tried to grip everything edible in its path.
Even with your perfect memory you cannot
remember that bull frog five years ago…
he must be big as a wheelbarrow by now and his
bull horn must have knocked down every tree
in a wide circle around him. Now he wakes
everything, except, of course for those deepest
of sleepers after their last suppers.