Tonight's Possum Event

Tiger's a 21-pound cat on about a 17-pound max frame.  Rescued lean off the mean streets, he was a mean one himself, though looked like a raccoon had been meaner.  By mean, I mean fought for his food, and who wouldn't?  I get an edge at a buffet.  Now three years into his new home, I'm proud and lucky to call Tiger my little brother.

Just after dusk, Tiger's crouched on the edge of the deck as flat as a cat can make himself, intently focusing directly below, where an unsuspecting possum is snuffling around almost four feet down and near the recycling bin.  It's a regular visitor.  It seems to be the same one Tiger discovered playing possum in front of the house several months ago. They all don't look alike.  Tonight is different though.  Tiger's caught some luck, and now he's ready to spring.  Will the possum see him in time?

No.  Tiger's in the air, falling fast.  Look out below!  Thud!  Bulls-eye on top of the poor critter.  Now what?  That's what Tiger seems to wonder.  Since the possum didn't die of fright, possum popped back up and they're facing off three feet apart.  Hiss, goes possum, teeth sharp and menacing-looking, as they've been since soon after dinosaurs went extinct.  Cats are newcomers by comparison, but learning fast, able contenders.  They take turns taking short steps toward each other, like boxers, then back off again.  "Would you mind please running away" may be the message of the bluffing.

They each bravely hold their ground, cautious about fleeing or fighting. Then suddenly from four feet above drops a flying primate, landing feet first near and equidistant to each, scoops up Tiger and gingerly absconds with him around the corner of the deck and up the steps to safety, while the possum saunters off and Tiger wriggles in frustration.  Standing on the deck a while longer, the primate and cat still in tight liaison enjoy the cool evening air, allow the adrenaline a chance to dilute, and check that yes the possum made haste while the moon rose.

Remembering another evening, when Tiger jumped off the same end of the deck and chased maybe the same possum about 75 feet through the woods, over fallen trees and branches, and followed it off a three-foot ledge down onto the creek flood plain, the primate thought better of letting Tiger stay outside a while longer and the two went indoors.  Out alone again in the cold night, possum waddles in and out of mottled moon shadows, clearly understanding it can never be sure what may happen next, but at least knows what hit him tonight.  Perhaps they'll meet again, under similar circumstances.

 

Star's third from last car ride

A ride?! She's genuinely surprised and excited,

eyes wide, thick tail wagging slowly, then suddenly

plaintive and anxious, remembering the feebleness

that's overtaken her and that belabors each step,

every breath. Yet trusting and eager, Star opens her heart

to one more ride, and, good sport she is, gladly lets me

lift and pose her gently in her usual spot, where

she immediately lies down, allowing gravity

to do most of the work.

Her withered elder's body fully lay against

the lower seat back. She half raises her head

with sheer hope, struggling with its weight.
Demurely, she turns her beautiful face

to the open window, her big soulful eyes

once again reflecting dear sky, soft clouds,

and tall roadside grasses, in radiant hues and

distinguishing sublime shades. She looks happy,

grateful, vulnerable.  She retains neither the strength

nor reflexes needed to counter well the car’s motions,

yet, leaning there, it's obvious she wouldn’t

trade places with anyone, for anything.

Further daring debilitation, and facing an instinctive

fear of being at the mercy of the laws of a world

that follow first strength and power, Star forces herself

up into a sitting position. Then, looking exactly the frail,

emaciated, and ill elder she's become, in weary exhilaration

she basks heartily in the thrilling sights, vigorous breezes,

and profound scents of the limestone cliff, the long lake

laying out below, the gray guardrail, the trees just on

its other side, the roadside flowers, the feelings, and memories

of pleasant and easier times, but never more pleasing

than this moment as we follow our familiar way home.

A tender moment of pure joy and purer heartbreak
crescendoing in union in the eyes of a friend

August 2004

Playing Playing Possum

That playing possum thing is irresistible, brilliant, and courageous. If you've never had one lying prostrate at your feet, giving a phantom wink at your upright giant mammal strength and mighty brainpower, then you should frequent places it could happen.

It's a life lesson as interesting as anything you could learn in school or passive resistance training, though that playing possum thing is something you just can't teach, and it's hilarious, almost unbelievable, like a suspension of some important set of life rules for the time it's occurring.

My dogs believed it though. Years ago, my two dogs, Mir and Star, were outdoors walking toward my front door, and my wife and I were following closely behind. We got closer to the door and a possum came around the corner of the house toward the door, happening along just at the same time. The five of us arrived at the door practically simultaneously.

The possum sized up the situation instantly and collapsed “dead” on the stone walk. I mean, what else could it do? It's slow. Dogs aren't. It's a hard strategy to question, given that it's worked well for possums for tens of thousands of years.

Well, Mir and Star started sniffing and snuffling all around and over the possum, covering its full length and breadth, and seemed curiously befuddled, and then lost interest and wandered off. My wife and I went inside. A few minutes later the possum was gone. The Oscar goes to…

A few months ago at early dusk, I was in my house and looked out a window and saw my cat Tiger walking up to a “dead” possum.  He sniffed it and excitedly pawed it a bit, as this was quite a find compared to the occasional dead cricket or even doomed live lizard, yet the possum remained still and “dead”. Tiger pawed it some more and then nestled down a few yards away in the sphinx position facing the possum.  He had decided he was going to outwait it.

I wanted to see who would win this staring contest, as this possum kept its eyes open during its faux morte, perhaps aware of the known incivility and unpredictability of cats, but after maybe ten minutes it was getting dark and with coyotes roaming the area, I decided to bring Tiger inside for his own good. Cats may be smart in many ways, but they can be dumb or stubborn in others, and regarding coyotes they're probably some of each, thinking that “It” could never happen to them.

After we were indoors a couple of minutes, I looked out the window and, of course, Possum Lazarus was gone.  Tiger cooled down, ate, and had a nap.  Cats are mostly inscrutable, and I wonder how much of their personality they keep to themselves and if in a way it's a kind of playing possum.

One night my wife urgently called me to come home because there was a possum under the bed. I was at our cabin up the hill and had a few moments to concoct a plan. Possum had wandered in through an open sliding glass door. It had ambled down the deck through a phalanx of three cats who either didn't mind, and certainly didn't feel threatened, or perhaps were in cahoots with it for the added excitement.

When I got there, I first made sure the sliding door was still open, then strategically moved around chairs, boxes, dressers, anything I could find to build what became a walled pathway, with necessary corners and twists and turns, that led from bed to open door. Next I got on the far side of the bed with a broom and softly poked toward it with the straw end. It immediately dislodged itself from under the bed directly into the “easiest maze in the world”, careening ahead and side to side, gently bouncing off the “walls” like a furry four-legged pinball with poor eyesight and a pointy nose, and through the house it went, down the short hall, under the kitchen table bordered by chairs lying on their sides, and popped right out the door
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Door closed, problem over, cats still nonchalant, and I still years later feel like a natural genius. You too can be a natural genius the next time you have a possum under your bed.  Just use my la-maze technique: First take a deep breath, then check your fear at the door, and lastly engage your sense of humor. Also, if you have a pet door, you might want to check it off your nightly list of locking things up before going to bed, so you don't have any uninvited guests underneath and wake up with a “dead” possum underfoot.

Last night I went to my backyard just after dark, bounding down the few steps onto the ground, and I stopped in my tracks as I noticed that a possum was stopped in its own tracks, standing up, only a couple of yards ahead and facing me. It had noticed me first, and now we were each on pause, eyes locked. Who would move first, if either, and which way? It sized me up quickly and speed-waddled off back into the good night from whence it had come.

With neither one of us expecting an encounter, the possum's instincts and reflexes were reliable, mine rusty and slow. If the possum had been almost six feet tall and myself less than one-foot high from the ground, I'd have been in huge trouble and this could have been the possum writing about last night instead of me.  I could have been in trouble anyway had it bitten me, say if I hadn't seen it and had kept approaching. Have you ever seen a possum bare its sharp set of teeth, or heard its ghastly hiss? I wonder what would have happened if I'd played possum. I wonder why it didn't.
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We live up a small hill from a creek and in some woods, and we’ve had possums, raccoons, and our cats on our narrow deck all at the same time with never a problem. Sometimes young raccoons will jostle each other a little and no one else, some family dysfunction apparently, but harmony has prevailed and it's felt magical as if it were lions and lambs and everything nice, nature meeting nurture, a prophecy unfolding, and a future foretold.

You see, there was plenty of food to go around, and we were like a good, just, and noble 'one-percent' who made sure that everybody was well-fed, and we didn’t hoard all our food wealth in a too-big-to-fail food bank (our refrigerator), but instead understand the value of compassion and sharing on a communal woodsy society scale. It's all for one, one for all, each according to its need, and within everyone's ability, and not dependent on fangs and claws.

It was a bright and clear night, and there was no end in sight. No playing possum was needed and no one was needing to be defeated.

The Last Firefly of the Season

Firefly is on an adventure

out at first darkness

fresh with hope
and tracing possibility

flickering on branches

through still vales

up steep hillsides

down to water's edge
a month since its last kin

traipsed the light fantastic

all come and gone

How far has firefly come
and how long has it searched

to now hover above the treeline

a view worth the effort

the better to be seen

floating high over the lagoon

it sees the larger world

and notices below

its own soft reflection

off and on

finds it entrancing
and enough

I Apologize In Advance

I apologize in advance

for my paranoid entirely unwarranted stance

for believing still in freedom and romance

I apologize in advance

I apologize sincerely for my part

for every thing I've done and said and every fart

I swear I didn't believe it deep down in my heart

and I apologize profusely for my part

I am truly sorry for my core beliefs

in the preciousness of truth and coral reefs

and I'll do my best to consolidate my griefs

and limit my questioning to boxers or briefs

Officer, don't think I'm trying to be crass

but when you shoot those toxic canisters of gas

would you kindly mind not aiming at my ass

and remember we are humans of your class

And excuse my head for getting in the way

of that beating stick you carry every day

and I'm regretful for my bleeding as I lay

just tell me who your cleaners are I'll pay

 

Here's a question for our ruling lords and mayors

do you think it would be fun or would be fair

if the cops break down your door while you're there

and then beat you senseless in your underwear

And threw your money in a great big pile

until it reached the height of a quarter mile

and lit a match while wearing a big smile

and watched it burn while laughing all the while

Or just ordered in a phalanx of dump trucks

and filled them with your property and bucks

and dumped them in the landfill just for yucks

just like you do to all the little fucks

I apologize in advance

for my bull-headed entirely unwarranted trance

of believing still in freedom and romance

I apologize in advance

you can keep the shirt but leave me my pants

I apologize in advance

for my punishment please send me to France

I apologize but could I have an advance

I apologize in advance

[Dedicated to all the Occupy campers and supporters, who understand very well what this song's about]

the puzzle that is grace

the pieces do not pick themselves up
nor do they put themselves back together
they're fully occupied being pieces
holding their forms and edges
retaining their character and content
the sounds sights tastes and smells
and somatic memory
of the force of detaching
and scattering
a diaspora as traumatic as any
and long floating falls from grace
there they are
right where they fell

Bobby's Birthday

Robert F. Kennedy turned 38 years old two days before his older brother was killed on November 22, 1963 in Dallas Texas.  Almost five years later, on the night of June 6, 1968, the then presidential candidate himself was killed in Los Angeles, California.  Today, November 20, 2013, would have been Bobby's 88th birthday.

On June 7, 1968, the morning after Bobby was killed, my morning began in the outdoor assembly lines at the end of a several-day Magnolia Boys State in-residence civic training exercise on a junior college campus in Jackson, Mississippi.  We participants had not yet learned of the news of the night before. We knew only that breakfast awaited after the staff were through with the morning announcements.

Jackson was a city that had only five years earlier in June suffered its own political assassination, that of Medgar Evers, in his driveway by a Mississippi white supremacist, and it had two years later in May 1970 seen two students at Jackson State College, a black school and now University, fatally gunned down and 12 others wounded, when they were attacked by Jackson's white supremacist police force, an official arm of apartheid at the time.  This military-type assault served as a severe corollary to Evers' earlier murder, which was committed by a vigilante terrorist encouraged by official state oppression and its attendant culture of hate.  Jim Crow takes this two-fisted approach everywhere it's allowed to thrive.

Back in June 1968 meanwhile, Jackson was still sloughing along as predominantly an apartheid city of modest size and of justifiable low stature nationally because of its racist intransigence, as hundreds of the state's hand-chosen potential future civic leaders gathered for the annual American Legion-sponsored Boys State on one campus and the comparable Girls State gathering at a separate Jackson campus.  We were a bunch of 16- and 17-year-olds picked locally from the towns and hamlets across the state.  Some of us excelled in academics or sport, others were in prominent families, and some were a mixture of all three.  We were there for a reason, to help provide for the future stability of the realm, to hold the future as it had always been held in the past, though I'm sure many of us were there for the trip and the stay away from home.

For purposes of the civic training, the entire group of Boys State had been arbitrarily divided officially into two parties, the Federalists and the Nationalists, a decent approximation of the two major ideological divisions in the country, which were an extension as well of the Civil War dividing lines.  These two groups were teaching vehicles used to help foster understanding of how political and legislative functions operated.  A more realistic approximation of how things worked in Mississippi would have been to appoint a king and close aides and tell everyone else to do exactly as they were told.  Good government was simple in this former and in many ways continued Confederate state, where by far the greatest concentration of slaves had toiled away their lives under the whip and chain, and whose descendants still filled out the ranks of the state's dispossessed and ignored at best.

We who were the Magnolia State's raw leadership material that summer morning of June 7, 1968 suffered through the announcements and the organized back-and-forth bantering cheers.  Ridiculous rhymes had been learned for the occasion, and we had to chant them before allowed to have breakfast, a mild though embarrassing coercion.  A Nationalist cheer went as follows: Potatoes, tomatoes, green pea soup, Nationalists, Nationalists, oop oop ee doop.  You can clearly see the thoughtful and meaningful process underway which the American Legion had deemed important to the future of the great and greatly misunderstood State of Mississippi.  If anything, the rest of the nation's low opinion of Mississippi was an overestimation.  That became especially clear upon what happened next.

First, an adult leader of Boys State got everybody's attention. Then he announced that the night before, Bobby Kennedy had been killed.  After a stunned pause of only a second or two, totally without coordination and without inhibition, Mississippi's carefully chosen future governors, legislators, mayors, councilman, and confederated army of separate-but-equal-forever businessmen let rip a spontaneous sustained roar of ecstatic delirium and wild abandon, punctuated by shrill rebel yells, that still reverberates today in my mind.  Once the acclaim died down, which took a while, we were led to the cafeteria for breakfast as if nothing sad and horrible had just happened. I'm sure I wasn't completely alone in my shock and utter dismay to be among these amoral jackasses, raised to be exactly what they had become, but it felt like it.  Contrary opinion was not encouraged in polite Mississippi society.

For the rest of that day, I felt more angry, outraged, and awakened than I'd ever remembered feeling.  I just couldn't do nothing. There must be something.  That night would be the farewell assembly in an auditorium.  I sought out a Boys State counselor.  I'd need help with an ad hoc plan.  I had to get in front of the assembly and do something, even if it was just symbolic.  I felt  intimidated to say anything directly, like share my thoughts on what had happened that morning, but I knew that no one else was going to do anything at all in response to the moral atrocity that had occurred that morning before breakfast.  I couldn't let that happen. It had to be today.

I told the counselor what I wanted to do.  I'm not sure if I told him why.  I might have though.  It probably rolled off my tongue from the roiled emotion.  I don't know why it felt okay to approach this particular person, but he obliged, for which I was and still am very grateful.  He managed to obtain the sheet music I'd requested, which seemed a bit miraculous. He arranged permission for me to sing that night and to have a piano brought to the stage and found someone who could play it.  Amazingly, things were on track.  Though it was a more frightening prospect than I'd ever remembered facing, I was comforted by the strength of the unexpected conviction that something needed to be done, but I also realized that many if not most of the teen cohort wouldn't necessarily grasp the symbolism.  Even with this limitation of impact, this gesture of respect would have to be enough.

The moment came, the auditorium was darkened save for sconces and footlights, the piano began its intro, and at the very back of the auditorium, to my surprise and at that very second, a good friend from my high school appeared.  Talk about your angels.  She'd been across town at Girls State.  She'd somehow found out what I was doing.  As she stood back there, her presence filled me with confidence.  I felt supported.  I was not alone.  She was someone well-known for a genial integrity and intelligence and who'd always been kind to me.  She'd also been my piano accompanist on solos back at hometown Biloxi High.  With her there, I was able to relax and perform with emotion my very modest possible dream of trying to make even a small difference in this place so lost in the misplaced grievances of time and warped by its selective privilege of hate, all of it previously hidden in the fog generated by a crass rationalization of the theft of an entire people's rightful entitlement.

Which dies harder, hate or hope? Which should spring eternal?

This is the song, though obviously not my version:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsNJtTKdUec [there could be a commerical].