Bat

1.

The cooling air grows more dense

where my eyes meet the treetops,

but I know that this is time, not color,

directing me along the curving sky

toward another day, to somewhere else

I once stood watching within

the endless form of all my thinking,

"the spherical prison that is time."

It would be right after soccer,

too late to score or too dark

to keep count anyway.

Next goal wins. No, it's a draw.

Still, we want to play, energetic,

sweaty, ready for darker game,

so we threw the lawn chairs in the air,

and bats flew out against

this sudden solidness:

out from the pine branches,

or breaking from loose tiles in the roof,

slow to rise, jerking gradually,

as if shouldering their surprise

at the weight of the taut skin,

foray to pick up speed,

swooping aound then back to their nests,

only the sip sip of the wings

on the air confirming they, too,

are still there, fitting perfectly

in the enameling sky.

2.

Faces in these gaps between

the ground at night and the sky

still shaking down dusk, game and dinner,

faces of two men who never met

when they were alive, but now,

features blending and reforming

in my prism of regret, hopelessness,

in memory– these faces seem one.

I want them to meet:

one so lively, so strong, even toward

the end he seemed to eat the tasty air,

the other eaten up by it, lying still

against each rough breath.

For I too flap out of darkness

when I sense them in the air,

I have been blind about death from birth,

but my wings continue and each

flight now extends without effort forever,

I will show my teeth and come on fierce

at everything I cannot see, remembering

how one of them, Dale, squared me off

suddenly with his bony hands and said:

I will sell you these blue jeans cheap,

they are getting too big for me.

I pay him and he dies.

It's too late to bring out

the sloshing lamps in wicker baskets,

too late for the nervous flames

coiling and startling, fire

evening across the lip of the glass,

I am as silent as the blue surface of the oil

below the desperate tongue‑tip.

But I know that this is about time, not color.