When I was young I came to a garden pool

and watched a snake swallow a frog.

 

I have meditated long on this

not wishing to leap to the freedom

of just any conclusion as the frog

must have wanted to do, 

how I saw death’s

turbulence reach out touching many around me:

teachers and a woman who pretended to be

my mother, and then not long after the snake

swallowed its prey, my own mother also died. 

 

What I know now was, when she did, I felt

nothing more than I felt watching that frog

move into the mouth of another world,

the marvelous drama of flesh mouthing flesh

and before that, the frog’s immobile wish

to be invisible while the snake flickered about

searching.  

 

How the frog must have struggled

more than my mother did

when she picked up the pistol by her bed

handling it with that casualness in her loose wrists

that comes from drinking too much, and then,

the bang. 

 

It was all over faster than the frog

who had a good half hour to contemplate

as first one leg disappeared, then the other,

until finally his head, eyes bugging impatiently,

backed down the serpent’s mouth into the belly

of its transforming future as if bowing

after a long and well played performance.

 

What I want to confess, though you cannot see,

is that I blinded myself and wandered about

the kingdom of my possibilities for many years.

 

 

 

© Tim Mayo

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First Published in Poet Lore (Fall, 2008)