Halloween, that time of ghoulish frights and tricks or treats. I don’t even like Halloween, but it seems to be the holiday that I celebrate. Or at least acknowledge. I send cards/CDs/candy and do a bit of baking. Or least I have but after this year will give much of it up. It has no meaning now.

The time, as poet Marin Sorescu commands, is nigh to learn flying blind: the future really is dark.

Let the bats teach us to see in that dark future.

Bat
–DH Lawrence

At evening, sitting on this terrace,

When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara

Departs, and the world is taken by surprise …

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing

Brown hills surrounding …

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio

A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,

Against the current of obscure Arno …

Look up, and you see things flying

Between the day and the night;

Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches

Where light pushes through;

A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.

A dip to the water.

And you think:

“The swallows are flying so late!”

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping

Yet missing the pure loop …

A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight

And serrated wings against the sky,

Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,

And falling back.

Never swallows!

Bats!

The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats

By the Ponte Vecchio …

Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one’s scalp

As the bats swoop overhead!

Flying madly.

Pipistrello!

Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.

Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;

And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags

And grinning in their sleep.

Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

The Bat
–Theodore Roethke

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

Photo (c) 2009 Michael Pennay used under Creative Commons license.