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To Batwolf

August 5, 2009 at 11:14 | Posted in Batwolf | Leave a comment
Tags: bats, Batwolf, hugs, joy, life, poetry, regret, tears, words

The Batwolf is not a poet.

Nor, for some strange reason, does he like onions. Whereas I do. So, perversely enough, when sautéeing onions, my thoughts usually turn to him, and to the cleansing effect that he and the tears provoked by onions have on my life.

Onions in the gravy, but I laugh away the tears,
Smiling with indulgence at all the squandered years;
God is in his heaven, and all’s right with the world,
Batwolf’s in his kennel, in patagial cape enfurled.

Now, I have to confess to being more logophile than biologist (which means, to the non-logophiles among you, that I’d rather study words than organisms), and I’ve rather fallen in love with the phrase “in patagial cape enfurled”. It sounds rather fine, and not a little Romantic. It’s such a shame that almost no-one will understand it.

The word “patagial” is a new one on me too. In fact, as I stirred the onions, the word I had in mind was “patagian”. Neither of my rather large dictionaries lists an adjective for the noun “patagium”, but TheFreeDictionary does (patagium). As far as I can tell, the word is mostly used to refer to a kind of tag used on birds, but it must be clear from the context that here it refers to the patagium, or “wing”, of the bat (or of the Batwolf). What floats this poet’s boat most about the phrase, however, is the etymology of the word “patagium”, which, in Latin, means the gold border of a woman’s tunic. That involution, appropriately enough, finds me hugging myself.