After A Long Illness
Lucyna Prostko
For years, one bat would come out from behind the window shutter,
cutting the summer like a velvet knife -- through the scent of
pine resin, the rusty song of a grasshopper,
and the insistent calling of chimes. Its journey uncertain and slow,
but stubbornly clinging to what might have remained.
Today, as every day, we get up, checking the news.
We sip coffee, match socks, make predictions
that are bound to fail for their lack of imagination.
Something terrible can happen
any day, this much is certain.
Another body to pay the price -- to be chased, suffocated,
isolated, sacrificed, deprived of water and sustenance, marked by sorrow.
In the desert, on the border, on the streets, in the privacy of one’s home.
I walk into the pre-dawn hour,
following the sleepy footsteps of my dog
who must go out in spite of anyone’s wishes, including his own.
I open a porch gate, and suddenly,
they spring all around me, whizzing through the dusky air,
a whole swarm -- in their gray velvet robes, beating
their wide sleeves against the fog -- diving over my head and then
over the tops of pines, over the hydrangea and hibiscus,
over the black-eyed Susans, the stiff necks of grasses,
and the milkweed asleep in its dignified silence.
I turn back, shocked by the abundance. Their errant flights
so close to my ear, I want to touch
their song. They are alive --
after years of empty winters,
after white fungus, inertia, disorientation.
Released, they dive up and down, and sideways,
crossing invisible paths, scooping sleepy insects out of the fog.
Pious, they feed their restrained hunger,
to retreat to the cavity of chattering colonies,
and sigh deeply inside their wings.
And I swear I hear their long-vibrating laughter –
through the milky fog and their short fitful sleep.
Lucyna Prostko is a Polish-American poet who graduated from the M.F.A. program at New York University. Her poetry appeared in various literary journals, including Fugue, Washington Square, Painted Bride Quarterly, Quiddity, Ellipsis, Salamander, Cutthroat, One Jacar Press and Five Points. Her first book of poems, Infinite Beginnings, was a winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award. She lives in the Adirondacks, New York.