all day above the porch where we eat
a hundred brown bats cluster together
and suckle air through their tiny teeth.
          Did it touch you?
crawling, climbing, clamoring, shifting—
each sometimes yawning or stretching a wing—
it’s sweet. every centimeter of one
touches, somewhere, another one’s body—
one moving brown mass clutched onto a beam.
I watch a bat nose up another’s wing
to burrow itself in the leathery underneath.
          Did it touch you?
I wish it came as naturally to me—
such closeness, familiarity.
all that comes easy in me
is longing, is denial,
is cleaver, envy.