'Frog and Toad Confront the Alterity of Otherness' by Dean Rader

   
   
The sun was hot in the sky

like a muffin in a bright blue tin.

The day was just the day.

The wind was nothing more

than wind, the leaves were leaves

and kept on being leaves.

Frog, however, wondered why

he was Frog and Toad was Toad.

Frog knew who he was,

but this strange morning

he feared he was the wrong one.

His skin felt too clammy,

his eyes too bulgy.

Even his pajamas seemed

that of another creature.

Everything was wrong:

the trees overhead; the birds in them.

Toad, on the other hand,

woke up troubled by how

different he was than Frog.

To him, Frog, was wholly

unknown and unknowable.

The yellow flowers outside his window,

the waterbirds down by the lake

that arrived only in winter,

the dreams of alligators and snakes

that swam through his sleeping,

all made more sense to him

than this Frog in his threadbare

suit and flappy feet.

How odd they both wanted to fold

into the foreign skin of the familiar,

inhabit the Frog and Toadness

of the other—

It is Toad who will understand

to love the unknown is to say yes

to the ineffability of difference.

And Frog shall find himself

stunned with a recognition

that to love the miasma of mystery

is to say yes to sorrow,

yes to the presence of absence,

yes to the chance that alethia

may never rise out of the pond.

Frog makes Toad some toast

with strawberry jam.

He waddles across the room,

sets down the plate,

pours Toad a cup of coffee.

The sun is hot in the sky

like a scone on a sky blue table.

Toad looks over at Frog.

Good old Frog, he thinks.

That bastard knows I hate toast.

Toad spreads the jam like a man

might smooth mortar on a brick

for which there is no building.

Thank you, he says,

Thank you Frog.

(from his book Works and Days, Truman State University Press, 2011)

Dean Rader's 10 Greatest Poets Project for the San Francisco Chronicle was covered by The New Yorker and the New York Times.