飛騰最識時 It Knows The Hour Best
你道他怎生模樣：你道他怎生模样：
逐句解 Line by line
And what did he look like?
The second time the chapter asks this exact question — the first was about the demon king, and the answer ran to five sentences. The cue is folded into its unit, so this line opens the poem. 模樣 reads mú, a later vernacular reading the dictionaries never recorded.
Head pointed like a rat's, eyes bright the same way.
A poem about a bat that opens by comparing it to a rat, twice, in matching positions — 似 and 如之. Having called the creature a bat once in the prose, the poem never says the word again.
Having wings, it comes out at dusk; wanting light, it stays in by day.
有…無… opens both halves and turns a habit into a rule. And the rule is exactly the case against what Pilgrim is doing: this is a creature with no business abroad in a lit room.
It hides its body through a hole in the tiles and hunts its food by striking at gnats.
兒 reads ér here, a full syllable, because it is the poem's rhyme word and a neutral tone cannot hold a rhyme. The rhyme runs 之 居 兒 時 and every one of the others is level. It is the same throwaway suffix that went neutral in prose five segments back — one graph, two weights, decided by where it stands. 藏 is cáng, to conceal.
It likes a clear bright moon above all, and in its flying it knows the hour best of anything.
識時, knowing the hour, is a compliment to the creature and a warning to the man wearing its shape — who is about to get the timing wrong by a single badly slung load.
Four couplets of five graphs, and it is a natural-history note rather than a portrait: head, eyes, wings, hours, the hole in the tiles, the gnats, the moon. Nothing in it belongs to Pilgrim at all.
Which is what makes it work. The chapter's earlier portrait poem described a demon dressed as a general and ended by saying he was neither beast nor man; this one describes an animal so exactly that the reader forgets who is inside it. Two poems about a shape that is not what it seems, approached from opposite ends.
The rhyme is level throughout, and it is the rhyme that settles 兒. In prose the graph is a neutral suffix you barely hear; in a rhyme position it has to be a syllable, and the poem will not have it any other way.