Mike Stone's poem begins high above the ground, with a faint trilling in the treetops as a small bat glides through the night air. Then the view drops to a man walking alone along a winding path in a forest with no moon. The bat's shadow, which the poem describes as "a humid volume of moving shadow," sweeps quickly across his forehead.
The speaker watches this moment from a distance rather than describing his own fear, but the feeling comes through in the details. The man seems to sense the passing more than see it, since it is "almost palpable." The final line carries the poem's biggest surprise. Instead of treating the bat as a threat, as its title might suggest, the poem compares the touch to "the gentle touch of one's own ghosts." The mood is hushed, eerie, and oddly tender. The darkness feels less like danger and more like a brush with memory, as though the man's own past has reached out for a second.