Poem: A Bat

 

A Bat

 

purple in dusk,

a bat practices its hand,

loops of cursive and dangling vowel,

twenty feet from my stride.

 

a comma somersaults to festoon,

before the bat squiggles around,

plunging through a nebula of gnats

only it can see with its fake eyes.

 

the manic infant terrible

hardly furnishes

the ornaments of a rococo sentence,

before rushing back, grand as Camus,

to start anew.

 

i wonder maybe it’s written

the first line of every book ever read,

yet still has far to go

before it forks to a final grandstand

and retires.

 

surely the bat’s sound beams of sight

appraise with expertise the fine-print drama

vivid in parchments of elderberry,

rowan and spruce. 

 

perhaps even the sideshows of late mushrooms

as they trumpet to exult and exclaim,

“write about me next, write about me!”

 

 

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

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