Poem: A Bat

 A Bat

purple in dusk

a bat practices its hand,

loops of cursive, a dangle of vowels,

twenty feet from my stride.

 

a fugue of commas 

somersaults to festoon,

before the bat squiggles around

through a nebula of gnats

only it can see with its cipher eyes.

 

the manic poet, infant-terrible,

hardly furnishes

the ornaments of a rococo sentence,

before rushing back, grand as Camus,

to start all over 

at the gates of nothing.

 

i wonder,

maybe the first line of every book 

ever read has been written,

and yet still the bat has far to go,

before it forks to a final grandstand,

high over the sideshows of late mushrooms

whose caps trumpet to exclaim,

“write about me next, write about me!”

 

 

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6/4/25... massive surgery, still on life support... 

5/18 ... "vowel" replaces "vowels"

References to Camus' character Joseph Grand and Frost's well-known poem,