Point of View: While Waiting

I don’t know if it’s that I’m finally getting it, but I’ve begun to feel more akin to nature, which, yes, includes rats and bats, and, of course, those wonderful languorous slugs about whose lovemaking I wrote a few weeks past.

Two days ago, I found on opening the refrigerator a bug upended and stuck near the bottom of the peanut butter jar, and gently lifted him free and set him down on one of the deck’s steps and watched intently as he rubbed his forelegs together and arched his wings closely behind him, much as I do on the exercise ball at East End Physical Therapy. And while I compress my shoulder blades so that I can stand up straight, he did it to get unstuck.

He had a round green head, and looked worried, and I wondered if he were frying in the sun, suffering because of my beneficence. I looked away for a moment, and then back, in time to see him take off with a whirr, and I felt good about that.

Last night, I was nearing the end of a biography of Rilke when black wings darted into the room. It was a bat. As fearful as he, I went to tell Mary, who shut all the doors she could while opening the kitchen slider, and some time later, on investigating, I saw him, still, on one of the beams, shined a light to show her, and then we turned the lights out, trusting he’d find his way back outside at some point.

He was still there this morning, curled into a ball. I nudged him with a broom and he circled madly about before zigzagging full speed into the out of doors.

Rilke thought bats had it even worse than us, being half-bird, half-mammal, and not knowing what the hell to make of it.

Baring one of my fangs, I asked Mary if bats bit. She said no, which was reassuring.

I generally go to her whenever I have a question of a scientific kind. Though this morning when I’d asked her how many centimeters one needed to be dilated in order to give birth, she said she didn’t remember.

Well, it’s 10. I just looked it up on the Internet.

Everyone’s waiting. . . .