Wings dark skinny and flapping the air,
Lost their flicker.
Spent.
He fell again with a little thud
Near the curtain on the floor.
And there lay.
Ah death, death
You are no solution!
Bats must be bats.
Only life has a way out.
And the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility
In life.
So I picked him up in a flannel jacket,
Well covered, lest he should bite me.
For I would have had to kill him if he’d bitten me, the impure one....
And he hardly stirred in my hand, muffled up.
Hastily, I shook him out of the window.
And away he went!
Fear craven in his tail.
Great haste, and straight, almost bird straight above the Via de’ Bardi.
Above that crash-gulf of exploding whips,
Towards the Borgo San Jacopo.
And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river
Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun’s departure,
I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing:
There he sits, the long loud one!
But I am greater than he ...
I escaped him....
Florence.