gift of the possum
For Cydney
Consider wearing such a satisfying body!
Consider being, with your entire self,
such
a quiet prayer!
Mary
Oliver
“First
Happenings”
There’s a dead
possum out on the moss
in my small driveway. Somehow
he’d (she’d?) found her
way enough
to list to
the quiet and still winter-stiff earth
and
lay it all down, every season, every bone
and
breathe
out
this last
footstep.
I think: what a
privilege, really,
to be chosen to dispose of its stiff
remains—I mean really, because it will
come to a shovel and
a bag
and
a lift to the local
transfer
station. Or should we—
my husband and
I, find some quiet woods
somewhere and offer the banquet
to the crows or whomever
happens
by? sniffs, licks the elderly
fur
enough to pull back to the skin,
or,
because its present
and
accounted for,
the tongue, a
little grub really, pink
curled in that dormant way all the
dead curl,
their lips and fingers
and toes, as though
they’d
intended to reach for something, and
nearly
grabbing it, pitched over,
into a stranger’s
yard, or anyway anywhere
at all, seized by an explosion of
the smallest
clot, and finding it all
too great a load, just drop it all.
In
shock? In relief? In resignation? Who knows—
The
fifteen year old girl
whose wake I
went to two days ago
was struck in just that sort of way:
reaching,
maybe, for a glass of
water
and
something split
beneath her skull
and
just like that it was all over—
like Jesus
saying “It is Finished” and later, while we all
peer in, look over our shoulder,
hover at her casket
and wonder what the hell
what the Fuck
what in
Christ’s name
am
I going to do now, she
and some possum are wandering
or wouldn't we like to think so, off
without us. And aren't we the ones now
going stiff from it all.
and some possum are wandering
or wouldn't we like to think so, off
without us. And aren't we the ones now
going stiff from it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment