July 2, 2026

Allow me a brief interlude from the A Life In Words Mostly Unread installments to present a puzzle. I like a good puzzle, but maybe not so much when the subject's me. While many unfinished pieces over the years have never seen the light of day, "The Last Supper" nags at me the most: 40-some interesting lines far removed from any potential ending. For goodness' sake, the poem ends mid-line, as if a Monty Python skit.  I have the ability to pinpoint some poems from the 1980s to a certain year or two, but this more recent one's time frame escapes me. I am tempted to say post-cardiac arrest and pre-pandemic, but those signposts form my recollections of everything for the last ten to fifteen years.

What ass writes a secular poem named "The Last Supper"? I must have been feeling pretty something (arrogant, depressed, whimsical, take your pick) to see myself as a Christ-like (or, going Python again, a Brian-like) figure scorned by a restaurant's Maitre D.

I guess I was the first to arrive/

The dozen of my companions recognizing/

When it is best to be fashionably late/

A reservation made when reservations/

Are what we all had.

Hidden within this brief passage is a line that I must have been saving for several decades. When my wife and I first moved to Detroit (1993), we called a restaurant we had never visited asking if they took reservations. The guy answered, "Oh, I would have reservations about eating here." (We ended up believing that he was only half-joking.) Apparently, I sat on that one for several decades.

Curious references abound in the poem that I assume are allusions. What do we do with "couples stumble out/with mumbles about the Madeleines"? T. S. Eliot influences again ("the woman come and go/talking of Michelangelo"), but surely I infer something more than a stupid cookie. Kahn? Albright? Bemelmans' heroine? Sigh. 

A little later, I clearly channel David Baerwald from his 1992 album Triage, stealing a voice directly from his "The Waiter":

Special tonight is Coq au Vin./

Roasted vegetables and a surprise./

Would you permit to recommend the wine?

All of this somehow tied to a nameless host, the greatest head-scratcher in the poem. There is something facile and slimy about the host, but that does nothing to limit the potential reference person in my life, all of whom I would hate to provide the most droll line ever: 

First to come, first to succumb/

To the randomness that is our lives.

Several times over the last 5-6 years, I have tried to come back and finish this, but how do I finish something alluding to a situation I no longer remember (the odds are that I remember the situation, just not as a last supper analogy)? Somewhere there is a key that unlocks a vault holding something, I'm sure, cynical to say about my work (either specifically or more broadly), but that key may be lost forever.

I might as well at least make this fragment public. After I die, readers please consider "The Last Supper" to be my "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" . . . minus the opium.

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The Last Supper

A Life In Words Mostly Unread Series Home Page (with all installments and sidebars as of 7/2/2026)