'The Morning Sun Discovers an Opossum'

Our dog has gotten too old to catch opossums. In his prime he could charge across the backyard, leap and grab the marsupial crawling along the top of the wooden fence. It was less like gymnastics than ballet, the way he would land already running, opossum in his jaws, shaking it like a ragdoll – one grand fluid motion.

If my mental tally is correct, he has captured sixteen opossums that way. Once I saw him lift the animal from the lawn by its head and shake it violently until I heard bones crack. All his prey but one played opossum and survived. I would go out in the backyard well after sundown and look for corpses. The mouth of the single fatality was open and I could count the pointed, perfect teeth. I lifted him by the hairless tail and put him in the trash bin.

 

Here is Timothy Steele’s “Didelphis Virginiana” (Toward the Winter Solstice: New Poems, 2006):

 

“The morning sun discovers an opossum

Run over at 18th and Robertson.

A mash of bloody organs, bone, and fur,

Distinguishable by its long bare tail,

It lies ironically in the crosswalk,

While traffic, two lanes each way, thunders past.

When the light turns, I hustle out, and scrape

And scoop it from the asphalt with a shovel;

In greedy expectation of the signal’s

Changing again, cars gun their engines at me.

 

“Many such creatures perish daily, nothing

In evolution having readied them

Against machinery: grief seems absurd.

Nature herself, ever pragmatic, is

Blithely indifferent to her child’s departure.

Even as I inter it in the garden,

Dew-drenched calendulas and larkspur glisten;

A squirrel sniffs its way along a phone line,

Apparently examining for flaws

An argument the cable’s carrying;

Having dropped anchor in the strawberries,

A mockingbird displays his wings, like someone

Opening the panels of an overcoat

To show he’s come unarmed and should be trusted.

 

“But our nocturnal forager is dead—

Native marsupial, nemesis of snails.”

 

Luke seems to have accepted his infirmity. At fifteen, the arthritis in his rear end – the pain, the weakness, the loss of youthful confidence – leave him indifferent to the presence of formerly easy prey. He pretends not to see them.