Chiroptera: The hand remade as a wing.
Back from the cave at least our voices come
To adumbrate us something like a home.
We’re chained inside the cave, but when we sing,
We see the shoutlines of our echoing,
Freedom foreshadowed, hooking thumb and thumb,
Chiroptera, each inkstained hand a wing
Brailling the cave our voices half become.
We place each other with the songs we sink
Like plumb lines spooling down the catacomb.
Stricken down but never stricken dumb,
We sing to listen to the shape of things.
Chiroptera: our hands are taking wing.
Out of the cave at last our voices come.
*
L’envoi
I listen to distances,
Shapeshifting resistances
That love and only love
Can make a landscape of.
We call to find a hearer
In an acoustic mirror,
The maze resolving into
A face that sheens a window.
I place you where you sing,
Remix our echoing
To map the dark around
Us both with ultrasound,
My ear against your ground,
The fetal heartbeat found,
Become, somehow, a poem,
And somewhere—here—its home.