Let us begin at slant light

with cut felt flickers,

unhooding cubic skulls,

furtive and hungry.

Trace our loopy symmetries

beneath the canopy as we feed,

follow our dance with open faces –

long diverged from the birds.

You cannot hear us but you'll feel

our hunting song across your teeth

defiling the laws of physics

with frequencies beyond this.

Watch our velvet forms take on

three dimensions or four

as we vanish into sky space,

a filigree of apple tree

bursting into fret-work,

scraps of jinking balsa,

flicking the Vs, skimming

odd quick trajectories.

We are fickle as kits,

wombed and jewelled

with kidneys, ovaries,

rows of studded teats.

Born to kill, we are strung

on struts of steel; dissolve

in darkness to anti-matter,

turning widdershins,

bewilderingly separate,

a tapestry of gremlin flight

angling on planes of sound,

almost sightless, blind-to-green.

Turn your ears towards us,

bearing truths in our pitch and fall;

forest-worlds and gardens returned

in sonic negative, transformed.

Hold us in dry hands

when you find us in the woods,

stroke our underbellies

with something approaching tenderness.