Analysis of "Possums" by Sheila Black

My past self wrote down for the first stanza, "Forced 2nd person perspective."  What's forced is this feeling, this "thrill" based on the action, "to lie on a road / and flatten yourself, [...]"  'Forced' may be too strong of a word, or maybe it isn't.  But the focus from the first poem is on this "thrilled" feeling through flattening which I think of letting go of contractions in the muscles and just lay there.  Flat.

The next stanza is the only one where it's a single line and turns the tone toward a neutral visual, "white fur like a ball of winter,"  where the speaker continues the simile by adding another simile that moves the image to spring.  But how does relate to this kind of "thrill" mentioned in the beginning?  How the images move seasons and meaning, so does what it means to really flatten yourself. Still.

"each one folded in like / the fledgling that never made it / from the nest."  This meaning, this thrill, folds into itself and with another simile that has a more grim inference of a 'fledgling' not making "it." There something zen about this quality of "it" in this line like the meaning of the "thrill" being folded into simile into simile.  It's a state where the speaker can only expand on thoughts but not on presence.  This ends the first sentence of the poem.

"The do this when they feel threatened, / remain motionless" After the first sentence, the poem goes back to the possum and more definition based approach to center the reader.  Again the speaker adds onto the scene but this time to add a sense of urgency.  What is patience when: 

even when curious people come prod
them with sticks,

stiffening their pearly claws as a tree stiffens
its twigs for winter [...]

 With the expansion, just like the expansion of similes, there's a threat of this thrill of flattening -- people trying to make you move.  And all the possum can do is stiffen a small part of themselves like twigs in winter.  "What is it to be dead?" is ironic because the possum isn't dead, but playing dead; however, what does death mean when, naturally, to stay alive the possum has to be so close to death in appearance.  It's like thinking of that idea of "fake it until you make it."  How long does one fake being dead until being dead.

The possums know--that eternal watchfulness
by which the dead in their stately wisdom

watch us
who keep moving

The first line makes me think of the skunk at the end of "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell .  The skunk exists there to take on what is left.  The possums here can only watch in this state between dead and near death.  This idea shifts to the idea of "the dead in their stately wisdom"  as they can only "watch us" the living "who keep moving."