SWEET

SWEET

SWEET

          Linda,
said my mother when the buildings fell,

before, you understand, we knew a thing
          about the reasons or the ways

          and means,
while we were still dumbfounded, still

bereft of likely narratives, We cannot
          continue to live in a world where we

          have so much
and other people have so little.

Sweet, he said.
          Your mother’s wrong but sweet, the world

          has never self-corrected,
you Americans break my heart.

Our possum—she must be hungry or
          she wouldn’t venture out in so

          much daylight—has found
a way to maneuver on top of the snow.

Thin crust. Sometimes her foot breaks through.
          The edge

          of the woods for safety
or for safety’s hopeful lookalike. Di-

delphus, ‘double-wombed,’ which is
          to say, our one marsupial:

          the shelter then
the early birth, then shelter perforce again.

Virginiana for the place. The place
          for a queen

          supposed to have her maidenhead.
He was clever.

He had moved among the powerful.
          Our possum—possessed

          of thirteen teats, or so
my book informs me, quite a ready-made

republic—guides
          her blind and all-but-embryonic

          young to their pouch
by licking a path from the birth canal.

Resourceful, no? Requiring
          commendable limberness, as does

          the part I’ve seen, the part
where she ferries the juveniles on her back.

Another pair of eyes above
          her shoulder. Sweet. The place

          construed as yet-to-be-written-upon-
by-us.

And many lost. As when
          their numbers exceed the sources of milk

          or when the weaker ones fall
by the wayside. There are

principles at work, no doubt:
          beholding a world of harm, the mind

          will apprehend some bringer-of-harm,
some cause, or course,

that might have been otherwise, had we possessed
          the wit to see.

          Or ruthlessness. Or what? Or heart.
My mother’s mistake, if that’s

the best the world-as-we’ve-made-it
          can make of her, hasn't

          much altered with better advice. It’s
wholly premise, rather like the crusted snow.