Missing.

HAUNTED

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature that has to fly.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

The bats who hang in the dark, chittering

from our eaves, seem

members of our house we haven’t

yet had time to name. We feel them

in the night air around us and catch

a glimpse of the movement

of their wings in the half-light of the moon.

Mouse angels I have called them,

terrifying and warm and mythical,

seeming almost terrified themselves,

skittering after the echoes of

their own voices homing in

on the smaller creatures of the night

and also larger winged beings, hunting

their bat blood to stay alive.

 

This morning I found one of them asleep,

hanging from the inside of a window screen

in our half-dark bedroom, and

wondered how it had gotten in and

why it wasn’t sleeping with the other

members of its choir, if it had been

expelled or simply gotten lost.

I covered it with a child’s

plastic drinking cup and slid a large

jack-of-diamonds playing card under

the lip, then I carried it out to the yard.

The bat landed on its back, spreading

the intricate framework of its wings

to right itself while I waited

to see if it could fly, as I remembered reading

that rabid bats can’t, and how my friend Ted,

having been bitten trying to help a fallen bat,

had needed a battery of painful injections to

sear the rabies away.

The bat struggled up on its pinions,

dragging itself through the grass as if

trying to reach me for help,

but I, fearing disease and for our dogs,

killed it with a shovel, not then knowing

that a bat can’t take flight from the ground,

must have a perch to receive the

grace of air under its wings. I could have

released it in the crotch of a tree, on a

window ledge. . . .

I picked up the skin of a ripped balloon

on the tip of the shovel and

carried it to the trash, protecting

our house and this faltering world

from what may have been just the

physics of being a bat. Maybe

the world won’t miss one bat. Maybe

I did the right thing. But the world, my world,

is missing it, crawling toward me for life.

Dan Gerber