Letter to Watson Near the End

Dear Trevor:   I wish there were a room one
could enter just before the end where questions
could be asked on any topic or concern.   My
list would not be the shortest.  I want to know
who cooked The Last Supper, why there are such

differences between totems and taboos, why
something about the act of self-realization connects
us to one another, and if there’s a list of Who’s
Who in hell.  I want to know how many eggs
the average chicken lays in a lifetime and what’s

behind the germ of wisdom in the mind of man.
I want to know if I always take the blue plate
special for all the wrong reasons, if it’s true that
if we didn’t settle for less once in a while we’d
all be married to different people, and if Murphy’s

Law has anything to teach us.   I want to know why
both eating and sex are so messy and why we’ve
developed an elegant system of etiquette for the one
and left the other to live in the animal state.  Do trees
ever worry?  Are we more than the fate of ingested

carbohydrates?  What are we to make of the ants?
All these years of industry and they’re still just ants.
If they get to Mars, we’ll have to take them there
ourselves.  And what about death?  Does it mean
the celebration has ended or just begun?  Does heaven
leave the earth behind or carry it in its wake?

Fredrick Zydek

Fredrick Zydek is the author of eight collections of poetry.  T’Kopechuck: the Buckley Poems is forthcoming from Winthrop Press later this year.  Formerly a professor of creative writing and theology at the University of Nebraska and later at the College of Saint Mary, he is now a gentleman farmer when he isn’t writing.  He is the editor for Lone Willow Press.