Sometime late this month we are supposed to be able to see a comet— the first to be visible to the naked eye since Hale-Bopp in 1997, so it's a pretty rare event. For a wile it should be visible even from Chico, despite the mini-metropolitan lights washing out the night sky. Comets, of course, have historically been seen as portents. I hope this one doesn't portend some terrible disaster. Oh, wait.
Just in the last few minutes I have grown very tired, and have come unfocused (more than usual.) My mind wandered briefly and I was undone. How does that happen? There was something I was going to say, I'm sure, and it has vanished. It must be time to sleep.
Sunday Verse
Bats
by Randall Jarrell
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
and catches him. He clings to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping, soaring, somersaulting--
Her baby hangs on underneath.
All night, in happiness, she hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night, and echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is, how big it is,
Which way it's going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats she catches
In full flight; in full flight
The mother drinks the water of the pond
She skims across. Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him
In moonlight or starlight, in mid-air.
Their single shadow, printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night; at daybreak
The tired mother flaps home to her rafter.
The others all are there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside-down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears, their sharp teeth, their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.