Bats in the Belfry

Alas, they are not vampire bats. Still they make an impression. This piece was written long ago but is being posted in honor of my friend Jess, who is wondering just what the bats in her attic are up to....

Echolocation

Small eyes fold into corners where rats hide

and birds nest.

The shy mammal wraps her glossy black cape

about her shoulders, licks out with a long

pink muscle and probes the private spaces

of an attic, a musty closet where

the other children’s shoes would lie

those long ago summers.

Her voice bounces off the abandoned eaves

and the opening where a green curtain

waves a balmy wind into chambers warm and thick

with peeling iridescent wallpaper.

She unfolds, careful not to crush her spring furs,

sweeps herself into the dusk

of a half-open hope chest and sleeps in the shadow

of an old box of his handkerchiefs.

(C) KL Pereira 

Do not repost without permission.

Fearless in the Face of Darkness

Because my amazing class of writing teens inspired fearlessness in me with all their wonderful and deep and difficult words, here is one of the poems whose dark truth I will meditate on tonight as I slip into dreams:

How to Sleep


Let your mountainous forehead
with its veins of bright ore
ease down, the deep line
between your brows flatten,
unruffle the small muscles
below your temples, above
your jaws, let the grimace
muscles in your cheekbones
go, the weeping muscles
sealing your eyes. Die into
the pillow, calm in the knowledge
that you will someday cease, soon
or late, late or soon, the song
you're made of will stop, your body
played out, the currents pulsing
through your brain drained
of their power, their purpose,
will frizzle out through
your fingertips, private sparks
leaping weakly onto the sheets
where you lay breathing
and then not breathing.
Lay your head down and relax
into it: death. Accept it.
Trick yourself like this.
Hover in a veil of ethers.
Call it sleep.

-Dorianne Laux

(found at: http://www.versedaily.org/2009/howtosleep.shtml)

Somehow, Elizabeth Bishop

I'm taking a poetry class on Elizabeth Bishop and I scribbled this into my notebook on the way home after class.

Somehow, Elizabeth Bishop

is always Elizabeth Bishop.

Both names. Properly addressed

like a stranger at a formal party.

Not like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton,

who after so many years of reading and

meeting and parting on the Green Line

to Newton and Wellesley are just Sylvia

and Anne (whose grave I visit regularly

like a favorite aunt, whom I like to think

I entertain with dramatic readings of very

modern poetry as we picnic under the trees

with the other long dead). Somehow they

are familiar to me. I know their secret names.

But Elizabeth Bishop does whisper to me

as I take the Red Line over the Charles,

watch the dull lights of the Prudential

Center blink drunkenly at night.

She does not tell me her secrets.

Elizabeth Bishop lays life out before me

on a plate, perfect images crisp for my mouth.

She invites me to taste while somehow

giving little of herself.