Surprise is an inadequate word to describe my reaction to the recent publication of poetry in the West Seattle Herald. Pleasant surprise or even astonishment would be more accurate words.

For, you see, I’m a long-suffering would-be poet. I even took a course in poetry and writing poetry in a former life when my idealism was nearer the surface. Since that time I’ve produced what some might recognize as poetry and others would merely suffer through out of politeness. Which leads us to this:  What’s poetry, anyway?

Like the plastic arts, some would say that poetry is defined only in the eye of the beholder. Some would also say that, like the plastic arts, poetry has a traditional framework on which to hang. I am one who thinks that both are true.

Some rules do apply, but that the images and emotions evoked in the reader are most important. How the poem appears on the page is also important to me because that structure impacts on how it’s read and understood. That appearance often translates into how it means as much as what it means. But the most important element in any poem is how it sounds when heard read aloud. 

Try reading aloud, and with feeling, a poem that may just lie on the page like a wet blanket when read silently. (Ah, the imagery of that line.) Add to this the simple fact that every word in a poem must count, must carry its weight or be discarded to the heap of  words that gather at your feet as you write. What results just might be poetry. But, then, who’s to say that anything we produce in the name of poetry is not just that?

You sigh in your impatience; where are the bicycles in this ramble about poetry? How does the love of bicycles and riding them blend onto a page of poetry without stretching the bounds of reason to breaking? Can we smudge the page of a new poem, fresh from the printer, with the grease of a bicycle chain and think that it adds to the whole? Maybe. That is if we love both and simply proclaim that they are one, as I’m going to do here.

With all that said, I hope you’ll forgive, or at least understand and maybe even enjoy what follows. This is a work in progress as are all of my poems. That’s what poems are. Perfection is never achieved; they can always be improved with a new reading, fresh eyes and fresh ears. I must confess that I’ve changed a word in a poem just before and even during a reading just because.

Elegance

Two tires held in place by ribbons in the middle, thimbles on the edge.
Rubber with no tread, little weight.
Folded in a pocket with room left over.
A half inch touching earth when not.
 
One frame of angles connected by braze or fiber.
Smooth and shimmering paint attract the eye.
Like a beautiful woman,
or perfect sunset.
 
Bar with swooping curls at the ends.
Curls that drop from a straight top
and resting place for levers.
All wrapped in tape to caress the hand.
 
Cranks and cogs transmit force to a whirring chain.
A chain that runs to a tangle of springs and levers.
telling the machine how fast to go,
how good the beast astride.
 
A thin piece of leather atop a fragile post.
Material slides over the smooth surface a hundred
beats per minute driving the machine on.
Creating a vision of elegance.
 
All topped by an amalgam of muscle and bone.
Covered with colors of slick and stretchy fabric,
grasping the bars, sitting on the saddle,
cranking the rings that drive the chain and turn the wheels.
 
The whole is elegant as it slips through the wind,
along tracks, up hills and down.
Elegant, too, when still.
Waiting to be let loose upon the world.
 
This piece of elegant artistry that is a bicycle.
           
Even while mentally composing your next poem while riding your bike and watching for trucks, ride safely.