Confluence
Love Poem for a Dying Bat
One year I knocked you out of the air
into the river with my fishing net. Another,
you swept through lunch but didn’t come back.
There was the time you bit me and I sent you off
to the CDC and you came back positive.
I live with part of you inside of me, for years
seeing at dusk your body flitting through
the sky. For years falling asleep with you on the wing,
snatching bugs midair, sometimes sleepless, loops
of fly line unfurling alongside your patterns of flight.
I spent decades ignoring rivers for fish, until
the rivers ran dry; white-nose syndrome, diversions,
turbines, pollution, declining insect populations,
overgrazing, habitat loss. So much part of a river,
you were the river itself. This rabid world, mad
with longing for what used to make us whole.