Fire to Fire New and Selected Poems Pipistrelle 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 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. Fire to Fire New and Selected Poems . Copyright © by Mark Doty. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.