Echolocation

Owl
The Devil’s headlamp stalks the red cells
in a mouse miles from itself—the yellow lens
is resinous, fat, dense as pearl firming-up
& renders its beam heavy with currents.
Into a dustbowl of annihilation the rotating head
seizes its empire of blood; a storm collapses each
mouse bone as the threnody of rain crushes the air.
Bat
Their music is a quiet submitted to order by darkness.
translate their invisible wind is to sculpt a gastronomy
of the eye. They hang with their backs to the cave’s engine.
Each ungodly contralto splits the radio-beam into a blister.
Sucking a berry from its root, they are a single purple wing.
Do not tread in the sweeping arc where this puffing locomotive
swallows the engineered airstream. It is a silent calypso.
Bumblebee
They unfurl their jerseys from Mexico to Miami
in an anatomic miasma darkening their bunker.
They are darts of themselves, swallowing the porchlight
melting in the melon punch & fists of downpour.
Their stuffy plunking ignites a redline to the stucco ceiling.
Curling clockwise like a coaxing faucet
their pastel fronds dust a car horn in a polyp concerto.

Sean Singer

Echolocation