“A bat floats in a glacier-fed stream in Glacier National Park, MT. While watching westslope cutthroat trout in a deep pool, I noticed a dead creature tumbling through the hole. I dove down to get close to the bat and accidentally swallowed a mouthful of water. I only managed a few frames before distancing myself from the bat.” Photo: Steven Gnam

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. 

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