What Is It Like to Be Like That on a Balcony in St. George, Utah, 23 March 2019?

As when a symbol, realizing itself to be such, to be

Required by current usage to be a something that stands

For something else, probably something else less compact,

Less efficient to produce in and of itself, something else

That would take much longer to instantiate, understands

A symbol can be symbolized by another and another,

Any number of symbols, by all the apocryphal turtles

Of symbols upon symbols, “all the way down,” decides

To speak for itself, to be the ground of its own meaning,

So the bat, dancing with its desperate hunger on the air

Beyond the evening balcony, chooses to come to rest abruptly,

Inverted, under the open door, heart racing with the effort

Of being a bat, of being what it is like to be a bat and not

A symbol, a turtle, or an infinite stack of turtles any longer, crying

In a voice so precise it describes the presence and trajectory

Of every flying bug in the twilight, a song so shrilly perfect

The highest hosannas of ghosts and of angels cannot reach above

And enclose such qualia, that the cosmos produces consciousness

Does not necessarily entail a conscious cosmos! Like a symbol

Of a turtle left deep in a cave home to bats, like a hard problem posed

By a soft philosopher, the conscious thought sheds no light of its own.