At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum <br />Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street <br />Was brightly lit, the opossum would take <br />A few steps forward, then back away from the breath <br />Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars <br />Would approach, as if to help it somehow. <br />It would lift its black lips & show them <br />The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors, <br />Teeth that went all the way back beyond <br />The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep <br />Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins <br />In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away <br />Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully <br />As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand <br />In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could <br />Sever it completely from the wrist in forty. <br />There was nothing to be done for it. Someone <br />Or other probably called the LAPD, who then <br />Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who <br />Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing <br />Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered <br />Together his pole with a noose on the end, <br />A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped <br />The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.<br /><br />Larry Levis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-oldest-living-thing-in-l-a/
