It was the nature of the frog to be compliant
That doomed the pair, not the failure
Of the scorpion to sheath its tail. I had been
This frog on more than one occasion
And was saved the first few times merely
By the fact that it was not a scorpion I bore.
So I knew that I could have been stung
And sunk before, but still it was my nature
To swim across open bodies of water
And to show off how useful I could be,
Homely and awkward on land though I was.
Even my whining to the scorpion at the end,
The part of the affair now famously packaged
As dark morality, only showed that I could not
Grasp my own witlessness in being
So easily persuaded to attempt something
As stupid as to carry a rhetorical scorpion
On my soft, fat, vulnerable back into depths
No scorpion could survive. The last comment
Of the scorpion itself was lost to all but me:
“Why did you cruelly agree to carry me
To where you knew my drowning a certainty?”
Now that I’m a ghost, I can see there’s a reason
No one spots frogs ferrying other species,
And the fact that the scorpion ended
As equally unhappily hardly comforts me.
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