the national poetry month issue || parenthesis
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
ParenthesisAuthor(s): Christopher BakkenSource: The North American Review, Vol. 292, No. 2, The National Poetry Month Issue (Mar. -Apr., 2007), p. 37Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478883 .
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NAR
AL HUDGINS
Bats at twilight
Shouldering shadow, the mid-October sky loses its religion, turning trees in stained-glass colors
gray as stone.
The sun slips out the back, late for a party out of town;
my friend at the front door buttons up his coat before saying goodbye.
Passing over the ashes of this congregation, silhouettes of wings prompt me to remark about birds flying south, but my friend (following our history of amiable contradiction) says no, they're bats.
Gloom tucks in the corners of the groomed lawns, as these dark acolytes,
darting about in the dying light, set up their acoustic Eucharist,
and long after my friend has disappeared into the charcoal neighborhood, I stand in my dim doorway watching the eerie masquerade that dusk offers
these naked wings.
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN
Parenthesis
Monteverdi there, a background purpled by mezzo soprano,
and other thoughts lifting like incense from the metered lines of open books. Even the cat,
my Dionysian prowler, once a marauder of all light, is afire with concentration
where she's dying on the kilim. On the table, cut for nothing, a lemon flaunts its open wounds.
JASON MICHAEL MacLEOD
The Desmodontinae They need blood at least once every few days to survive. If they can t get blood,
they'll approach another bat whilst roosting, asking for a blood 'transfusion. The blood is exchanged mouth-to-mouth in a motion
that looks very much like kissing.
?"Vampire bat" <wikipedia.org>
What survival comes, comes of us,
Comes of our bodies asking outward
for another body, for the flow of this flawed vessel to that one, the slow
sharp merge that always ends in motion apart.
Still, be this mammal that lives at night,
winged, sanguivorous: each long flutter hastens the wide rhythm:
this arc of absence, then,
back to those slender roosts where we converge.
March-April 2007 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 37
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