Thanks to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice, Christopher Lee and Frank Langella and Gary Oldman, Bob Kane and Christopher Nolan, and who knows how many others, the public perception of Bats is of a fearsome, bloodsucking creature of evil. Consider, then, Myotis lucifugus, the Little Brown Bat, who swoops away swarms of REAL bloodsuckers, the Mosquito, and keeps us from being eaten alive.

All the words to “dusk bats” were written while sitting on a lawn chair in a public park in Clarkdale, Arizona, waiting with my Sweetheart for a bluegrass band to set up and perform in the park’s gazebo. It all unfolded as written, the bats doing their stochastic swooping, maintaining a respectful distance above us in a sort of punk ballet. The air cooled, and peace and harmoniousness filled the park.

Here are the words:

dusk bats

the pink leaves the overhead cloud

but there is still lavender up there

and some commuting bugs are getting

c a u g h t

in bat-mouths working for bats
whose funeral-umbrella wings
dart and dip them around

in constantly-broken trajectories that

m a i n t a i n

an above-head distance of thirty
to
twenty
feet

they are not spooky
nor ugly

just u n f i l f u l l e d