Mark Doty, professor at University of Houston, lives in New York City. He has 
seven books of poetry and three books of prose. This book collects his poems in one volume. His blog is at http://www.markdoty.blogspot.com/ .
PIPISTRELLE
from Fire to Fire by Mark Doty
His music, Charles writes,
makes us avoidable.
I write: emissary of evening.
We’re writing poems about last night’s bat.
Charles has stripped the scene to lyric,
while I’m filling in the tale: how,
when we emerged from the inn,
an unassuming place in the countryside
near Hoarwithy, not far from the Wye,
two twilight mares in a thorn-hedged field
across the road—clotted cream
and raw gray wool, vaguely above it all—
came a little closer. Though
when we approached they ignored us
and went on softly tearing up audible mouthfuls,
so we turned in the other direction,
toward Lough Pool, a mudhole scattered with sticks
beneath an ancient conifer’s vast trunk.
Then Charles saw the quick ambassador
fret the spaces between boughs
with an inky signature too fast to trace.
We turned our faces upward,
trying to read the deepening blue
between black limbs. And he said again,
There he is! Though it seemed only
one of us could see the fluttering pipistrelle
at a time—you’d turn your head to where
he’d been, no luck, he’d already joined
a larger dark. There he is! Paul said it,
then Pippa. Then I caught the fleeting contraption
speeding into a bank of leaves,
and heard the high, two-syllabled piping.
But when I said what I’d heard,
no one else had noticed it, and Charles said,
Only some people can hear their frequencies.
Fifty years old and I didn’t know
I could hear the tender cry of a bat
—cry won’t do: a diminutive chime
somewhere between merriment and weeping,
who could ever say? I with no music
to my name save what I can coax
into a line, no sense of pitch,
heard the night’s own one-sided conversation.
What to make of the gift? An oddity,
like being double-jointed, or token
of some kinship to the little Victorian handbag
dashing between the dim bulks of trees?
Of course the next day we begin our poems.
Charles considers the pipistrelle’s music navigational,
a modest, rational understanding of what
I have decided is my personal visitation.
Is it because I am an American that I think the bat came
especially to address me, who have the particular gift
of hearing him? If he sang to us, but only I
heard him, does that mean he sang to me?
Or does that mean I am a son of Whitman,
while Charles is an heir of Wordsworth,
albeit thankfully a more concise one?
Is this material necessary or helpful to my poem,
even though Charles admires my welter
of detail, my branching questions?
Couldn’t I compose a lean,
meditative evocation of what threaded
over our wondering heads,
or do I need to do what I am doing now,
and worry my little aerial friend
with a freight not precisely his?
Does the poem reside in experience
or in self-consciousness
about experience? Shh,
says the evening near the Wye.
Enough, say the hungry horses.
Listen to my poem, says Charles.
A word in your ear, says the night.
