"The Saint’s Strange Way to Practice Death"

Among the road kill I’ve tallied on Houston streets, the most common casualty is the strangely spelled opossum (from the Powhatan). The least common, incidentally, is the armadillo, with two KIAs sighted in twenty years, both being pecked at by crows. Natives here seem uncommonly fond of opossums, adopting them as the state or regional marsupial mascot. I once helped a neighbor rescue a litter of baby opossums, apparently deserted by their mother, hiding in another neighbor’s junk-filled garage. He bottle-fed them until they were old enough to want to escape. 

 

Up close, they are primitive-looking creatures, even savage, yet with an odd sense of vulnerability about them. They have hairless rat tails and teeth resembling hacksaw blades. They hiss when bothered. Yes, they do “play opossum.” Roughly a dozen times in the last decade our dog has caught one in the backyard, always after dark. Only one was a confirmed kill. The rest walked off after we yanked Luke inside. In the photo above you can see one he treed in the crepe myrtle several weeks ago. In 2022, Benjamin Myers published “Possum” in, of all places, First Things:

 

“On feet bare like a desert saint’s, it pads

across the porch and toward the dry cat food

my wife pours out for strays. It doesn’t scare

when I stomp, bellow, toss a pebble

at its rump, just hisses at me, geezerly,

and keeps on chewing. Eyes like little radio

dials and fur like coal snow, smog sky, or anything

smudged, dirty, it reminds me of the boy

in school we called Possum for how he slept

through class and how his eyes were beaded black,

his nose sharpened to needle fine. When at last

I knock it off the porch with one quick blow

from a snow shovel, it scuttles under

a shrub and disappears into the house’s

cracked stone foundation, knowing more than I—

beneath the sound of footfall, chair-scrape, voice

descending like the ash of distant fire—

the saint’s strange way to practice death.”