Brigit Peegan Kelly: 'Pipistrelles'

I bought Brigit Peegan Kelly's Song at The Haunted Bookstore in Iowa City. I'd read the title poem and one other by her and wanted to read more. Naturally, having returned home, I put all the books away and had nothing but good intentions while doing so.

On the flight to Bombay, this was the one book I took with me. I read and stuck a finger between the pages while wanting to weep or make some extravagant gesture of appreciation even while being strapped in to my seat and trapped by the food cart.

I read 'Pipistrelles' and wrote frantically in my notebook. Then, as we prepared to land, I put the book away and didn't read another word from it until I - once again - returned home. In the interval, Ranjit Hoskote read a poem (At Hope St. Poets on the 5th) about skin. It felt like a word read and constantly making its presence felt soon after, because there was 'Pipistrelles'.

But you need to read the whole poem. Here it is.

Pipistrelles

i.

In the damp dusk

The bats playing spies and counterspies by the river’s

Bankrupt water station

Look like the flung hands of deaf boys, restlessly

Signing the dark. Deaf boys

Who all night and into the half-lit hours

When the trees step from their shadows

And the shadows go to grass

Whistle those high-pitched tunes that, though unheard, hurt

Our thoughts. Pipistrelles, little pipes, little

Night pipes, the peculiar

Lost fluting of the outcast heart. Poor heart.

The river’s slate waters slide

Silt and grief, the whole destroyed mountain of winter

Over the weir. Never stopping,

Sometimes slowing, but never stopping. And

Along the banks the skinflint trees

Clasp their weak heat. Well, they are a touchy choir,

A confused congregation, breathing

The thin air of our unteneted world. The sun pales

The leafy dogma goes, and we are left

To our freedom. But do we see now

The world as it actually is? Or merely another world?

A world within a world? Perhaps

In spring when the dogwood

Slowly discloses its hoard of pale mothlike blossoms

It is the mind that mulls

The sap – perhaps it is the mind

That makes its worlds

And the miracles therein.

ii.

the bats resemble the deaf.

But they are not deaf. They live by echoes as we do.

Negotiate by echoes. Send signals out

And field the reflections on the wing. And only

Great fear will hang them

On the piano wires we string to test them,

Dead certain of our right to know

At any cost the mechanism of another’s flight.

Even blindfolded, even painted

All over with nail polish, the bats will manage

Those wires pulled free

From their instrument, from their sound, will play

Around them a makeshift music

So lovely the pianist’s fingers will falter with envy,

And only great fear will hang them.

But it is different with us. Fear in us

Is central. Of the bone. It is our inheritance.

Our error. What flies back at us

From rocks and trees from the emptiness

We cannot resist casting into,

Is coloured by the distortions of our hearts,

And what we hear almost always blinds us.

We stumble against phantoms, throw

Ourselves from imaginary cliffs, and at dusk, like children, we

Run the long shadows down. Because the heart, friend,

Is a shadow, a domed dark

Hung with remembered doings. A night feeder – moths,

Fur over the tongue and the wet jewel of blood,

The cracked shells of insects

Split on the wing. And elsewhere, by connection,

Blood draining from the perfect cut

That brings the rabbit down, a slow singing out,

As in a dream, the blood sliding,

As the water of the overflowing creek does, sideways

In its brief bid for freedom,

While above, something wings away.

iii.

we are not birds. Despite our walls covered

with winged men, we are not birds.

And all that is birdlike in the bats

Is also deception. They have

No feathers, no beak, no high-pitched heart.

Their wings are skin. Skin! Stretched

From shoulder to foot like the cloth

We nailed to wood to build

Our doomed medieval contraptions for flight,

Or like our taut sheets, the high-strung skin,

The great single wing of sex we lean on

But we are not birds. All that is birdlike

In us, in the bats, is illusion.

There is nothing at all of the bird in us....

Except for flight. Except for flight.