In the night, the gorging begins
again, in the spring
night, in the branches
of the Moreton Bay figs,
that are fully-rigged
as windjammers, and make a flotilla
along the street.
And from the yard-arms
are strung clusters
of hanged sailors,
canvas-wrapped and tarred –
these are the bats, come
for the split fruit, and dangled,
overturned where they land.
It is the tobacco fibrils
in the fruit they seek,
and those berries, when gouged,
are spilt, through the squall
of the crowd, like
a patter of faeces
about the bitumen. This amidst
the cloudy shine
of the saline
streetlamps. In the ripe nights
the bats fumble and waste
what they wrest –
there’s a damp paste
upon the road,
which dries to matted
sawdust, soon after the day’s
steam has reared; it is scraped
up by the shovel-load.
The bats are uncorked
like musty vapour, at dusk,
or there is loosed a fractured
skein of smoke, across
the embossed lights
of the city. The moon is lost,
to an underhanded
flicked long brush-load of paint.
You think of the uncouth ride
of the Khan and his horde,
their dragon-backed shape
grinding the moon
beneath its feet.
And then, of an American
anthem, the helicopters
that arrive with their whomp whomp
whomp. I’m woken
by the bats still carrying on
in the early hours,
by the outraged screech,
the chittering
and thrashing about
where they clamber heavily,
as beetles do, on each other’s backs.
They are Leonardo
contraptions. They extend
a prosthetic limb,
snarl, and knuckle-walk
like simians, step
each other under
and chest-beat, although
hampered with a cape. In sleep
I trample the bedsheet
off, and call out
‘Take that!’ (I am told),
punching the pillow in the heat.
I see the fanged shriek,
and the drip
of their syringes,
those faces with the scowl
of a walnut kernel.
It’s some other type of bat
I think of: these, in books,
where I looked them up,
have a face you can imagine
if you recall how you’d whittle
finely at a pencil
and moisten the lead
with the tongue-tip –
a little face that belies its greed,
like that of an infant.
All partly autonomous things
trample others down,
even what is their own,
and the whole earth throbs
and smoulders
with pain. No comfort for us that
in the nights I have seen
how the living pass
about the earth,
that is deep with the ashes
of the dead, and quickly, too,
vanish into dark,
like will o’ the wisps
thrown out of the sun.
At three o’clock I gather
our existence
has been a mistake. I would like
to turn my back on
its endless strife;
but when I look out
at the night, I am offered
otherwise only
the chalk-white, chaste
and lacklustre moon.