part of my problem with poems is thinking in pieces that are too big. I have gotten used to think of time as something that takes at least seventy-five minutes with no intermission.

The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.

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 the 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.

– Larry Levis

Once, at a bipartisan chiefs of staff retreat in Charlottesville, [Huck] Gutman stepped in to demonstrate the power of poetry. A training session had grown tense, recalls Stephen Ward, chief of staff for the Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.). Gutman rose, Ward says, and announced that he felt compelled to recite a poem. The 12-liner by Philip Larkin makes liberal use of a certain four-letter word that begins with the letter “f.” The chiefs of staff cracked up. Tension gone.

– From a Washington Post article on the poetry-propagating Huck Gutman, chief of staff to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who runs an email list sending out poems to Washingtonians. Via AJ.