visitation
Mran-Maree Laing
I felt their flickering orbits
before I saw them
a centrifugal fluttering
that unspun me
from my book
two microbats
wandered off course
centre of gravity
lost
*
in the soft light
two cookie cutter batmen
whooshed through
a fold in the universe
themselves folding and unfolding
skin-tingling otherness
their black wings
collapsing all luminosity
and my chest a sinkhole
of primitive fear
I wondered if they shared
so I turned off the lamp
thinking they could hear their way out in the dark
forgetting echolocation does not read lumen
that they knew how to leave just as they’d known how to come
*
I had imagined their lives
these past evenings
as I listened to them whisper-wing
from and to the rafters on the veranda
their foxy faces and satellite ears
their playgrounds of bough and tree
their blissful flight ways of silence over the fields
the crunch of insects in their tiny jaws
their conversations of chirp and squeak
as they hunted and homed
to hang elongated seedpods
sounding me out as I was them
until our evenings ripened to this one
*
did they hear my small room
with its bed and armchair
as only an absence of curve
a curb on the pleasure of swoop
my protective ceiling a senseless stifling
of clouds
moon
plummeting sky
did my geography of comfort
say only
gravity’s
siege
in the astrophysics of echo
was I as strange to them as they to me
my world as unhomely
*
unable to offer my visitors anything
except presence and curiosity
I located the room’s centre
closed my eyes opened my ears
body an antenna skin a high sensitivity dish
and slowly the bats appeared
in sound pointillism
until my skin was a living canvas
swirling with delight
*
and when a wing soft as an eyelid
electric as an angel feather
surprised my outstretched fingers
some small and sacred thing
blazed
between us
an accidental galaxy
in which we three spun
*
then silence
I opened my eyes `
their gossamer prayers
had dematerialised
as suddenly as they had come
MRAN-MAREE LAING’S work has appeared in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Cordite, The ACU Poetry Prize Chapbook and elsewhere. Mran-Maree won the 2024 Varuna Flagship Poetry Fellowship, was shortlisted for the 2024 Thomas Shapcott Award and was a 2025 Bundanon Artist in Residence.
