Summer 2008, January 2010
Sometimes I write poems where the protagonist is, arguably, a bat experiencing relationship problems.
All distance disguised as desire,
all travel disguised as salvation,
when silence passes for separation
and your own voice hums like a distant station —
love, or echolocation?
I have sucked all the nectar from this angular night, I
have caught the quiet moth on the wing —
in blindness descended from blindness unshaken, in
a silhouette dreaming of a destination, in
love or desperation —
When the color was drained from your monochrome film
and you laid it out bare on the table,
trading shapes for shadows, trading shadow for sable,
calling gray-on-gray an exaggeration
was this love or an incantation?
I shout and I witness the edges of things
come boiling back from their old locations,
after one long moment of hesitation —
In the humid air of this alien night,
before we discovered the myth of flight,
your silver shape, in fine gradation,
in a room of lines of demarcation,
was this desire, or isolation?
