Today’s poem is “Glory Train” by Sidney Wade. Her seventh collection of poems, Bird Book, was published by Atelier26 Books in September 2017.She taught workshops in Poetry and Translation at the University of Florida’s MFA program for 23 years, and spends part of each year in Rangeley, Maine.
She writes, “I was cleaning the upstairs bedroom in my home in Rangeley, shortly after returning in the spring, when I found this ball of brown fluff on the floor. Had no idea what it was, so I bent to inspect it, blew on the fur, which was the brown fluff, and it all blew away, revealing a perfectly preserved bat skeleton, along with a couple of maggot corpses. It took my breath away, it was so beautiful. And those bones in the wings!!!! finer than the finest of threads.”
Glory Train
by Sidney Wade
Cleaning
house,
I find, in
a dried-out
flower
of brown
froth,
the tiny
skeleton
of a bat.
I set it on
a white plate
and tweeze
debris
from its frame.
The hand-
wing bones
are thin
as veins—
a miracle
of design,
fine almost
to vanishing,
the ephemeral
on which
so much
depends.
The pelvis
is small
as a pushpin,
frailer than
eggshell;
the fragile
vestibule
of the ribs
is clean and
unbroken.
It harbors
eight
desiccated
larvae that had,
rather late,
hopped
aboard
this darkly
upholstered
glory train.
The minuscule
figure hints
at the beautiful
old rhyme
of moon
and ruin,
in which
constellated
hungers twitch
and fly,
feed on each
other and die.
Poem copyright © 2017 Sidney Wade.
Reprinted from Bird Book {poems},
Atelier26 Books, 2017
by permission of Sidney Wade.