(shared by a friend from poetry class)

The Man with the Hearing Aid

A man takes out his hearing aid
and falls asleep, his good ear deep
in the pillow. Thousands of bats
fly out of the other ear.
All night they flutter and dive
through laughter, catching the punch lines,
their ears all blood and velvet.
At dawn they return. The weary squeaks
make the old stone cavern ring
with gibberish. As the man awakens,
the last of the bats folds into sleep.
His ear is thick with fur and silence.

At the Office Early

Rain has beaded the panes
of my office windows,
and in each little lens
the bank at the corner
hangs upside down.
What wonderful music 
this rain must have made
in the night, a thousand banks
turned over, the change
crashing out of the drawers
and bouncing upstairs
to the roof, the soft
percussion of ferns
dropping out of their pots,
the ball-point pens
popping out of their sockets
in a fluffy snow 
of deposit slips.
Now all day long,
as the sun dries the glass, 
I’ll hear the soft piano 
of banks righting themselves,
the underpaid tellers
counting their nickles and dimes.