Poetry in America

Bat Boy, Break a Leg

6 bat boy, break a leg The student with two studs in his nose and a dragon tattoo crawling from his collar, who seems always ready to swoon from bliss or despair, now flits at my office door. I will look at his poem drawn onto a music score and find nothing to say about chance or HIV. Only later I’ll think to tell him the night before I left home, I slept sadly in our old house until a wing touched my cheek, tenderly as a breeze. I woke to black fluttering at my feet, and a mind fresh from the other side said don’t turn on the light, don’t wake the man, don’t scream or speak. Go back to sleep. The next morning I remembered that people upstate whack them with tennis rackets, that the Chinese character for good luck resembles the character for bat— both so unsettling and erratic— but it’s bad luck to say good luck in China, as on stage where they say Break a leg, so delicate bats must be woven into silk brocade and glazed onto porcelain plates. Next morning, I found a big-eared mouse with leather folded over his shoulders hanging from claws stuck in a screen. All day, my work made me forget, but then I’d remember, passing the window where he slept, shaded under the eaves. 7 He was fine. I was fine. Then at dusk, he was gone, suddenly. Pale boy dressed in black, maybe the best that can be said for any of us is that once we were angelic enough to sleep with strangers. He touched my cheek. I opened the screen. He flew in his time. We did no harm. ...