Down the Rabbit-Hole

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon
began talking again. Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I
should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) `I hope they’ll remember
her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were
down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but
you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know.
But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ And here Alice began to get
rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of
way, `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, `Do
bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either
question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt
that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she
was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very
earnestly, `Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a
bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of
sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Drink the blood: for the grieving
-till heads hit stone.
Fly over the columns
straight in a row

defeat us to enrich us

Save the worm from Mother Earth.

color our sky…..blind-
to save our glory.

and
Take us with you:the earth’s too still
all warmth below just melts within

within the
seeking
underworld

T C Gue

A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings
to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping,
Soaring, somersaulting-
Her baby hangs on
underneath.
All night, in happiness,
She hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and
echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is,
how big it is,
which way it’s going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats
she catches
In full flight, In full flight.
The mother drinks the water of the pond,
She skims across,
Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him.
In moonlight or starlight,
In midair
Their single shadow,
printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night.
At daybreak,
the tired mother flas home to her rafter
The others are all there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears,
Their sharp teeth
Their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.

The bat is dun with wrinkled wings
Like fallow article,
And not a song pervades his lips,
Or none perceptible.

His small umbrella, quaintly halved,
Describing in the air
An arc alike inscrutable, -
Elate philosopher!

Deputed from what firmament
Of what astute abode,
Empowered with what malevolence
Auspiciously withheld.

To his adroit Creator
Ascribe no less the praise;
Beneficent, believe me,
His eccentricities.

As these tiny bulbs of fur free
themselves of the last crystals of ice,
the emergence begins.

Want for energy,
the awakening triggers the revival of the heart,
full veins warm the skin,
and the old motives resurface upon the brain.

The eyes become alert.
The fingers spread and give hint to wing.
Suddenly there are two dark petals,
and the cold winter of sleep is let go,

in exchange
for the blossom

of a long awaited flight.

Rob Dunn
Kalamazoo College

The Fruit Bat

Because the air has darkened
like bruised fruit, you creep
down the bare branch

where you slept all light long,
gathered into yourself like a fig.
Little mandarin woman fleeing

under the stars on bound feet,
when your wings spring open
even you look surprised.

What are the raven’s slick feathers
beside these pewter sails
raised in the foundry of your flesh,

burnished by light poured
from a wasted moon and a dipper
brimming with darkness?

NANCY WILLARD

Cal: This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

In days of old and insects bold
(Before bats were invented),
No sonar cries disturbed the skies-
Moths flew uninstrumented.

The Eocene brought mammals mean
And bats began to sing;
Their food they found by ultrasound
And chased it on the wing.

Now deafness was unsafe because
The loud high-pitched vibration
Came in advance and gave a chance
To beat echolocation.

Some found a place on wings of lace
To make an ear in haste;
Some thought it best upon the chest
And some below the waist.

Then Roeder’s key upon the breeze
Made Sphingids show their paces.
He found the ear by which they hear
In palps upon their faces.

Of all unlikely places!

After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”

From “Come into the Garden, Maud”

Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, Night, has flown,
Come into the garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone;
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad,
And the musk of the roses blown.

And this from “In Memoriam”

And Bats flew round in fragrant skys
and wheel’d or lit the flimsy shapes
that haunt the dusk; with ermine capes
and wooly breasts, and beaded eyes.