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Who knew? I'm told, by Los Angeles poet Richard Beban, that this morning's verse about opossums was no lone wolf. He says there is something of a cult of local poetry that admires our non-native but fully absorbed urban marsupial, and that Eloise Klein Healy, founder of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Antioch Los Angeles, is a master of the sub-genre. He found one of hers online that includes this passage:
Could it be that coming our way
is a hayrick made of pine
and overstuffed like a sock monkey
or could it be a “slo-mo” voodoo doll
followed by an unlit fuse of tail?
No, it is the Goddess of the Night,
Ms. Opossum on a ramble
from the Laundromat hedge
to the trailer park bramble.
Beban has been a student of Healy's at Antioch and his first book for Red Hen Press, What the Heart Weighs, makes an offering to the canon:
Opossum (for KK)A black & white Dalmatian-
spotted opossum, sharp at
nose & long pink tail,
meanders, barrel-bodied,
across our quiet street, skirts
edge of the neighbor's lawn,
disappears, king of nonchalance,
past impatiens & agave plant,
around the corner of the brick
foundation.
My love is an opossum, unexpected,
oddly shaped, close to the ground
& somehow resolute, certain of itself,
& you.
At home we recently identified five (or perhaps six) separate opossums that include our back deck in their nightly roamings. They at least know to use the steps; an overweight raccoon that showed up a few weeks ago almost strangled itself struggling to climb up and over the railing. For more on L.A.'s ubiquitous Didelphus virginiana, or Virginia opossum, click on this post from last year or visit the wildlife pages at the city's Department of Animal Services.
Photo: Corbis via L.A. Times