`Calling Into Darkness'

I who fear tall buildings and speeding automobiles have no fear of spiders and insects. I don’t like mosquitoes and fire ants but they don’t inspire loathing. At least one scorned species, however, I positively admire -- bats. I was taking out the trash at sunset Monday when I noticed them dipping and soaring above the treetops, harvesting insects. It’s the smooth certainty of their motions, guided by the enviable gift of echolocation, I find most beautiful. They move with confident grace, like Fred Astaire.

I remember spelunking once in upstate New York in the middle of winter, when the temperature below ground was a uniform 43 degrees F. We entered a narrow room and turned our flashlights on a wall of hibernating brown bats, thousands of them. Soundless, they fluttered like leaves and we turned off our lights. They looked small and vulnerable, as though we had entered a nursery.

Last week I brought home from the library a recent collection of poems by A.E. Stallings, Hapax. The title, from the Greek and also known as hapax legomena, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A word or form of which only one instance is recorded in a literature or an author.” In her epigraph, Stallings defines the original Greek as “once, once only, once for all.” She studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University, and now lives in Athens, Greece. I didn’t open her book until Tuesday, when I was pleased to find a sonnet, “Explaining an Affinity for Bats,” that nicely articulates my thoughts about the flying mammal:

“That they are only glimpsed in silhouette,
And seem something else at first—a swallow—
And move like new tunes, difficult to follow,
Staggering towards an obstacle they yet
Avoid in a last-minute pirouette,
Somehow telling solid things from hollow,
Sounding out how high a space, or shallow,
Revising into deepening violet.

That they sing—not the way the songbird sings
(Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)—
But travel by a sort of song that rings
True not in utterance, but harkenings,
Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.”

Thanks to Stallings, bats have become metaphors for artists, poets in particular, “calling into darkness/To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.” It’s a densely layered conceit that, before it unfolds, pleases the ear. The final line is perfect and very satisfying iambic pentameter. The next poem in the collection, “Variations on an Old Standard,” also includes a reference to bats:

“The bats inebriate the sky,

“And now mosquitoes start to tune
Their tiny violins.”

The verb “inebriate” is rare and useful, though the lines about mosquitoes are trite. Because I’ve spent weeks sequestered with more stringent sensibilities – Spinoza, Zbigniew Herbert – Stallings’ mix of musicality and wit has been a pleasant diversion. Her poems remind me of lines from “The Poems of Our Climate,” by Wallace Stevens:

“The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”