Patricia Rockwood on “Abecedarian: To the Possum Who Visited Me One Night”

Unlike most of my poetry, which usually starts with an image or feeling and unfolds from there, this poem, “Abecedarian: To the Possum Who Visited Me One Night,” clearly needed to tell a story. The abecedarian – also called abecedary – offers an interesting way to advance a narrative, with the strict alphabetical progression of initial starting letters within 26 lines. I’ve always been fascinated by poetic forms and enjoy experimenting with them. I think it’s partly because I love puzzles, and poetic forms feel a bit like puzzles to me: I find myself asking, Can I express this feeling or image or idea in the form of a villanelle, sestina, or sonnet, for instance, without it sounding contrived? If it doesn’t work, then I might try something else, or go back to simple free verse. Usually, the context suggests the form, and I take off from there. With my students, I often suggest that they try writing a poem using an unfamiliar form as a way to break out of a rut, or to expand their means of expression – or simply to have a little fun. 

Every story has a setting, and mine is Sarasota, Florida, where I live on a postage stamp-sized suburban parcel that I keep as wild as I dare. I have no grass, just mulch paths, perennial plants, shrubs, vines, and small trees that I try to trim now and then (mostly “then”). When I bought the house, twenty-five years ago this fall, the only vegetation on the property was a couple of magnificent oaks and a scraggly orange tree (since departed). I was younger and a lot stronger then and hauled dirt and manure around like a farmhand. I planted gardens and laid out paths. I planted mostly perennials, which was a wiser move than I knew at the time, because now, when I can’t move around like I used to, my yard is a visual representation of Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest: The strongest plants have thrived, they pretty much take care of themselves, and all I have to do is trim them back once in a while, when I can. I am in Zone 10, and my semitropical plants grow like, well, weeds.

Some parts of the yard I have left largely untouched – that is to say, as beautifully chaotic as nature wants to be. My side yard, for example, is now a largely impassable riot of flowering vines and shrubs – but the blossoms attract butterflies and hummingbirds, so I can’t bear to cut things back very much. The undergrowth provides habitat and hiding places for all manner of fauna as well, from insects and lizards to larger critters. When I’m sitting on my lanai at dusk, a raccoon or possum – preceded by discreet rustlings in the undergrowth – might pass by on its way to the water sources in the backyard: the raccoon to the birdbath, the possum to the ground-level water dish. It makes me happy that they can find shelter of sorts near my home. The suburbs, after all, are not their natural habitat, and they must survive as best they can. It’s a hard life. I have to stop myself from feeding them, though if they dig up the kitchen scraps I bury in the back garden, no one will know, and besides, everybody’s got to eat, right?

Like most children, I felt a kinship with small animals and always secretly wished they would make friends with me; come to my hand; allow me to pet them like my dog and cat. I must admit I’ve never really outgrown that wistful desire. But, also like most children, I grew up and learned that there was an invisible barrier between our world and theirs. I would never learn to speak their language, and they would never speak mine (Alex the Parrot notwithstanding). Our Venn diagram always had and always would have an extremely thin overlap. Perhaps the reason wild creatures so enchant us – while at the same time causing an undercurrent of free-floating anxiety – has to do in part with this mysterious remove; that no matter how much time we spend in their company, we can never really know them.

And yet, we can never stop loving them. The natural world fills up my pages, as it does so many other poets. Writers are often advised to “Write what you know.” I would add, “Write what you love.”

The little possum that I wrote about could have mistaken the small hole in my lanai screen for the hole in the shrubbery that led to his burrow. Or maybe he was just following his nose, as I suggest in the poem. Or perhaps he just went exploring, like kids do, and got into trouble. Whatever the happenstance, I was glad to play host for a little while. And though he would never know it, I was especially glad to confer a bit of immortality on him by making him the star of my poem. 

A few years after the incident I wrote about, I opened my back door one morning and found an adult possum, dead, lying next to the screen. Digging a grave to return him to the earth, feeling a tiny bit weepy, I had to wonder whether he was the same one that had visited me that night.