Across the road, there is a cemetery. Listen: the bats are singing

          their song of night, their song of sanctuary. Sound rises

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from a thicket in the brush, rises with the chorus of southern

          stars and the stories they tell. What secrets burn to speak

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in the dark? With the dead, there is life. The bats are feasting

          on the night’s ripe fruit and females swell the clitoris

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with blood. They are protected in the ashes, pleasured on the

          slitted bark thick with ivy. Dangling from the branches,

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they dream with Death — the man outside my window, hanging

          from the tree. How many men will he possess? How long

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will he walk, looking for light? Illuminated by flame, I was unlike

          him. And he was watching me. My mother, holding me,

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but only in spirit. There is more to me than spirit. Beyond the

          grounds, the bats are hunted in the broad of afternoon.

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Children climb into the canopies and catch them while they sleep,

          haul them home to their mothers, lame in the palm. Hunger,

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like Love, is a deathless animal of the heart. Like Lust, she thirsts,

          and in the dark, she sings. Can you hear her burning?