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"When I got there, the dead opossum
look like an enormous baby sleeping on the road.
It took me only a few seconds just seeing him there
with a hole in his back to the wind blowing through his hair
to get back again into my animal
sorrow. I'm sick of the country,
the bloodstain bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking out of the grills,
the slimy highways, the heavy birds refusing to move.
I'm sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,
that joy and death, that philosophical understanding of carnage,
that concentration on the species.
I'm going to be unappeased at the opossums death.
I'm going to behave like a Jew,
touche his face, stare into his eyes
and pull him off the road. I'm not going to stand in a wet
ditch with the Toyotas and the Chevies passing over me at sixty miles an hour
and praise the beauty and the balance
and lose myself in the immortal life stream
when my hands are still a little shaky
from his stiffness and his bulk and my eyes
are still weak and misty from his round belly
and his curved fingers and his black whiskers and
his little dancing feet."