A bat lies dead at the foot of a wind turbine, and there is hardly a mark on it. That puzzle opens Dave Bonta's poem. The title reads like a newspaper headline, with "Bends" tucked into quotation marks as if the writer knows the comparison is borrowed. The poem starts in the flat, careful voice of science reporting (an autopsy, a "zone of low pressure") and then slowly lets that voice drift into something closer to myth.
The form is unrhymed free verse with no fixed meter, and the plain syntax suits a poem that begins as evidence. Sentences run across line breaks, and the breaks often land on small shocks. "Each whirling blade grows" ends on a verb we expect from plants or animals, so the machine seems briefly alive, and the next line delivers its hidden hazard, "a zone of low pressure at its tip." The longest sentence is a question: "for what / in 50 million years of evolution / could've prepared them." It stretches over several lines, as though the speaker is slowly taking in how big the mismatch is. Evolution works over millions of years, and the turbine is far newer than that. Sound does quieter work. In "wingbones unbroken" and "stiff calipers still cocked," the hard b, k and st sounds make the line feel clipped and brittle, like the dead animal it describes. The ampersand in "& the bats" gives the poem a casual, jotted-down feel, which keeps the tone from turning solemn too early.
The imagery is built almost entirely from the sea. The bodies are "jetsam," a word for things thrown off a ship. The turbines have "masts." The dying bats "drown in the air" and "crumple / like divers with the bends." The poem treats the sky as an ocean, so the technical explanation of barotrauma becomes a drowning that happens in the open. One small pun may be intended. The "web of vessels" in the lungs is a network of blood vessels, but the word prepares us for the "ship" to come. "Web" also recalls the stretched membrane of a bat's wing. Judging by the imagery, the poem keeps folding the animal's body and the machine's world into each other.
Another contrast runs underneath. The bat's ears are "stiff calipers," a measuring tool, and its echolocation is called an "exquisitely tuned sonar system." The animal is described in the vocabulary of precision engineering, which makes its failure stranger. It has a finely made instrument, and the instrument tells it nothing about the danger. Even the lure is quiet, since the bats are "attracted to the motion," so their curiosity or hunger carries them in. Then "go silent" ends that sentence flatly, and the poem moves on without comment.
The last four lines turn to legend: "The propellors spin on, as if in service / to some vast, uncaptained ship, / a new Flying Dutchman." The Flying Dutchman is the old story of a ghost ship that cannot stop sailing. The comparison suggests the turbines keep turning with no one clearly steering them. "Yawing" is a sailor's word for a vessel swerving off course. The word also fits the way turbines can turn to face the wind, though the poem never says so. Over it all hangs the "glue-eyed moon," a strange phrase that makes the moon look sticky, dull and fixed in its stare. It watches without helping, and the bats' own night has become the scene of their deaths.
The poem matters because it avoids the easy sermon. Nothing in it names a villain, and it never says the turbines should not exist. It lays out the harm and lets the scale of the mismatch do the arguing. The harm is also invisible, since the bodies look "unharmed" and the injury happens inside. What stays with the reader is the idea that an intention can be good and the damage still real. The blades "spin on" regardless, and the poem leaves us watching them with the uneasy sense that progress can sail on with no one at the helm.