Stephanie Burt

RACCOONS

They know no tragedy of the commons,
only the way all that plastic clings to their claws
and butter wrappers shred themselves.

Now let yourself describe
where the animals hide.
They make everything you deny
about your own life into something useful,

nutritious and redolent
of manufacture: soy, sesame and machine oil,
banana peels like blooming lilies,
bits of plastic bags: white flags.

Keep away. We’ve got this,
they seem to say. They pretend
to be the wind. Their split-meat scraps are craquelure,
soup greens and celery heels a diviner’s dream,

an industry that nobody will insure.
If they stare back at us it is without malice,
much less envy: they, too,
have jobs. They know what they have to do.

Surviving at night without coats
they watch our stakes on Earth grow thinner,
willing to dig them, or almost anything
else, straight out of what we throw away,
what they consider dinner.

STEPHANIE BURT is the author of multiple books of poetry and criticism, most recently We Are Mermaids (Graywolf, 2022). She also co-hosts a podcast about superhero games, Team-Up Moves. She teaches at Harvard.