You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Last Suppers<br />
PETER WALDOR<br />
Once when even your mother’s breasts<br />
would not console you, crying, screaming,<br />
I took pity on the others at the old hotel<br />
and in the middle of the night carried you off<br />
into the forest. In a bog we heard a bull frog,<br />
its voice deeper than the deepest baritone’s deepest hum.<br />
After three or four blasts you stopped crying and slept.<br />
And now a few years later, with scalpel<br />
you slice the white belly of a dead frog, pull out<br />
the dark stomach and slice it as well,<br />
and pull out a baby crawdad claw. You hold it up<br />
and test its still good mechanical actions<br />
and poke its tip on your fingertip, in your mind<br />
the image of a rocky shore and the moment<br />
before the last terrible moment and the last<br />
terrible moment and then a man whose face<br />
you cannot see wading in with hip waders,<br />
sweeping the frog up in his net just as it was enjoying<br />
its last supper. He calculates another 75 cents<br />
added to the great but not great enough collection;<br />
and still holding up the claw in the light,<br />
neither of us with any ideas about what happened<br />
to the great spirit that once inhabited it<br />
as it tried to grip everything edible in its path.<br />
Even with your perfect memory you cannot<br />
remember that bull frog five years ago…<br />
he must be big as a wheelbarrow by now and his<br />
bull horn must have knocked down every tree<br />
in a wide circle around him. Now he wakes<br />
everything, except, of course for those deepest<br />
of sleepers after their last suppers.<br />
-25-