A Modern Woman in the Wild

Tadarida brasiliensis, you are such a tiny thing.

Yet, next to you, I am nothing.

These long cures I toy with become boring.

These boys who fail to manipulate

us into loving them,

quieter than your quietest susurration

at the first millisecond of dusk.

•

Your flight stirs memories in me.

They slip through the blood vessels

like a million bits of glass.

I smell the oil and steel

of the Santa Cruz trestle

that connects the Beach Flats to Seabright.

The sleepy drummer beats behind my eyes*

as, single file, the memories follow

the lights of the Ferris wheel

into this granite place in my heart.

•

And there in that cold place,

your delicate wonder manifests

immensities,

things lost: friends, brothers,

direction, dignity - whole jet planes

disappearing into greedy, indifferent oceans.

Fear.

Also laughter, and searching.

Rounding corners, arms outstretched

to granite places in other hearts.

Throwing hallelujahs into the air.

Remembering Satie’s mournful piano

during a long cab ride to the basement

in San Francisco, toward Justin’s death,

our dear friend, that beautiful boy.

•

I lost myself, little bat, in your flight.

It’s unsettling to realize that there are

wild parts of this world

where I can still get irretrievably lost.

You do not search through motion what you’ve lost in space* as I do.

•

This Earth,

it is such a big, blinding place

full of things I can’t ever know,

and I am such a small, bewildered

creature.

•

*reference to Anne Sexton’s poem Sylvia’s Death written in 1963 shortly after Sylvia Plath’s suicide in February of that year

*adapted from Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie