Notes about Pipistrelle – The poem is not on the website.
The pipistrelle is Britain’s smallest bat. Bats fly on warm evenings, feeding on insects in the air. Note ‘dusk’, ‘evening’, ‘day cools on the house-walls’.
Metaphors: dusk ‘unwinds its spool’. The tiny creatures fly in circles and loops too fast to see properly yet movement is discerned.
Note ‘illegible’; ‘the screen of evening’ (the sky). ‘Subliminal’: their cries are too high for the human ear.
Verse 2: metaphors: ‘freehand’; ‘page’.
Verse 3: a bat expert once showed me a dead pipistrelle, beautiful, tiny, fragile.
Note metaphors for the delicate skin of its wings: bible-paper; a rose pressed between the pages of a book, the words showing through.