Everyone has a bat story, but Aaron’s is the one
that haunts me most. One night, his mother forgot
the sheets on the clothesline and they turned
into moonlit caves, or marble eaves, or attics
full of pearls—places darkness likes to perch—
and three bats slept there, three lightbulbs of dusk
hanging from a white ceiling, until she woke up
at dawn, suddenly remembering, and ran barefoot
across the wet grass to sweep up in one movement
the whole monument of it, coming back in
with an armful of bright ruins, crumbling.
That morning, Aaron’s father found the first bat
in his shirt pocket, sleeping, a pen full of soft ink.
His mother found the second bat as she put on her bra
and felt it fluttering, a dark heart, against
her chest. That night, Aaron shook his pillowcase
and the last bat flew out, a perfect metaphor
for a nightmare. What haunts me about this story
isn’t the ruined laundry, it’s not a kind of puritanism,
or the image of the bats hidden in the sheets
like seeds in a slice of translucent pear—
it’s that the bats went to sleep in what they thought
was a home, as animals in a cave, and woke up
as a pen, a heart, a nightmare in a boy’s head.
Jennifer Baker on “What Haunts Me Most”
“What Haunts Me Most” plays with metaphor in such interesting ways: beyond the nature poem’s usual descriptions of animal behaviour, or even of decentering that familiar perspective by thinking through a situation from the imagined point of view of the animal, this poem interrogates the human tendency to transform the living world into metaphor through poetry. This is a poem that makes a complex point from three sharp, beautiful images and holds a mirror to the concept of poetry itself.
Bios
Dominique Bernier-Cormier
Dominique Bernier-Cormier’s poems have won The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Contest, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, and Arc’s Poem of the Year. His most recent book Entre Rive and Shore (icehouse, 2023) was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize and won the Fred Cogswell Award. He teaches Grade 9 English in Vancouver.