Saturday, December 22, 2012

SELF PORTRAIT WITH POSSUM


I have brought you bananas
to help you die. Your left eye bulges
in a small pool

of damp scabs, and I try hard to imagine
a present suitable for your taste. I will bury
your body with everything, your molted fur

standing in fresh points of blood: orange
and lavender tissue paper
to show my respect, latex gloves

out of cleanliness. Your sweet nerve,
your average possum body a gift fit
for this flooded grave, the milk

of your blindness, thick and blue
only in death. Until today
the rain had not set in, winter

still hues away. Your tail bone
has come undone, a wet rattle
wrapped in dry wind. And in the shut

force of a high powered pellet gun,
your mouth rounds out
in a loud darkness

and in that very instant
of suffering in sound,
I try harder still to think of sweetness;

instead, I congratulate myself for digging
your grave with my very own fingertips,
my hands washed in dirt and open blood,

and I take the time to recognize
the shape of this month in the next.
The sky is just one cloud, opening and closing.

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