The Millennial Pedestrian

This poem is a good example of poetry doing a small thing so much better than prose could. A possum tries to cross a busy L.A. intersection: the raw ingredient for a "Metropolitan Diary" piece in the N.Y. Times. In the hands of Larry Levis, this minor urban vignette takes on the weight of history, prehistory, and our nightmare fears, while never losing its sense of humor.

The Oldest Living
Thing in L.A.

    By Larry Levis

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