The Possum Poem

So Gerald Stern wrote a poem

about road kill, a poem

everybody seems to know,

but I wonder if everybody thinks

about it quite as often as I do.

His poem is about an opossum

with a hole in its back “and the wind

blowing through his hair,” dead

on the road. Stern says he will

“behave like a Jew” and touch

the opossum’s face, stare into his eyes,

and pull him off the road.

After dark, after I’ve locked

the front door for the night,

after the outside cat has retreated

to her cozy shelter, I hear her

food dish banging on the porch.

It is pushed, flipped, slid, and flipped again,

its stainless steel racket pulling me

to the front door knowing

what I’ll find.

I turn on the light and lean against

the glass to see an opossum with its nose

in the dish—eating, or pushing it in a last-ditch

effort to extract every morsel from this

civilized meal. Sometimes the animal

is intact, and sometimes I see

the one whose back has been scalped.

I once knew a man who raised

baby opossums rescued from the pouches

of road-killed mothers. He explained

that opossums seek out macadam

because it retains the day’s heat.

Opossums have cold feet.

My feet get cold, too. I go through

boxes of foot warmers every winter.

I’m lucky. I can slap them on my socks

and walk around the house without fear

that two tons of metal will run me down

in my kitchen. But there she is,

the possum mama, nourishing her babies,

trying to get comfortable

in the only way she knows how.

And along come those bright lights,

that big noise, but her movements

are slow, way too slow

for 300 bullying horsepower.

I don’t know where Gerald Stern lives,

or how many opossums he has seen

on the road. I live in the country,

and see them on almost a daily basis.

Maybe it’s because there’s rarely room

to pull over, or maybe it’s because I’m only

one-quarter Jewish, but I’ve never

moved a dead opossum out of further

harm’s way. I like that he did, though.

But for now I set out a clean food dish

on the porch every morning,

wash the possum bathtub

I used to call the water dish, and keep

the cat food coming. When I lean

against the glass and see the one

with the skinned back, I tell her I'm glad

she survived to enjoy these meals.

We each do what we can.