Roast Possum

She dreams the baby's so small she keeps
misplacing it--it rolls from the hutch
and the mouse carries it home, it disappears
with his shirt in the wash.
Then she drops it and it explodes
like a watermelon, eyes spitting.

Finally they get to the countryside;
Thomas has it in a sling.
He's strewing rice along the road
while the trees chitter with tiny birds.
In the meadow to their right three men
are playing rough with a white wolf. She calls

warning but the wolf breaks free
and she runs, the rattle
rolls into the gully, then she's
there and tossing the baby behind her,
listening for its cry as she straddles
the wolf and circles the throat, counting
until her thumbs push through to the earth.
White fur seeps red. She is hardly breathing.
The small wild eyes
go opaque with confusion and shame, like a child's.

Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is former Poet Laureate of the United States. Thomas and Beulah won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Her seventh collection of poems, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, was published by W.W. Norton in 1999. The most recent of her many honors are the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the 1996 National Medal in the Humanities, the 1997 Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, and the 1998 Levinson Prize for Poetry magazine. Ms. Dove's song cycle Seven for Luck, set to music by John Williams and featured with the Boston Pops on PBS, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in July 1998, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth has been performed at the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Crossroads Theatre of New Jersey, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

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