'He Lies Until the Trauma Trots Away'

At age fourteen, our dog, if human, would be eligible for Social Security. Luke sleeps more than he did when a pup. His rear end aches and he takes nearly as many meds each day as I do. He throws up more often and has trouble jumping on the bed. We indulge him as we would a sick child or elderly relative, but he still surprises us. This week I found behind the garage a squirrel he caught and left on the grass – unbloodied, pristine, as though sleeping. It suggests reservoirs of wildness and grit still latent in the old boy. Proving his deftness as a hunter is the point, not a meal. In February he caught one and tried to bring it into the house: 

That makes five or six squirrels he has snared in the backyard since we got him. Twice we found them semi-buried in the lawn. The opossums he has caught number about fifteen. They’re slower than squirrels, less agile, and Luke leaps and grabs them as they move along the top on the wooden fence. I once saw him clutch a opossum by the head and shake it like his blanket. I heard bones crack. Only once did he actually kill one. The others “played opossum” and walked away when safely alone. Deborah Warren describes their enviable adaptation to danger and death in her poem “In Extremis” (Connoisseurs of Worms, 2021):

 

“Lucky possum who, in any crisis,

doesn’t have to do a thing but yield:

a stroke of narcolepsy takes control.

Stunned by an automatic anaesthetic,

his body seizes up, and the sudden coma

(the silver corpse dead to the wood and field)

is actual out-and-out paralysis,

 

“and it keeps the howling, yipping things at bay

by telling the world: nolo contendere.

Playing possum, as if it were a role

and he a gray marsupial Juliet?

Acting? No. He’s sleeping out the drama

where, making of ‘death’ a sanctuary,

he lies until the trauma trots away.”

 

Warren is one of our finest poets. She’s smart, tough-minded and has a reliably good ear. In this she recalls Robert Frost. “In Extremis” skirts light verse without ignoring philosophical heft. What biologists call “thanatosis” – playing opossum – Warren makes an enviable gift. She is both opossum and seasoned old dog.