Bicycles

It is about airplanes
I can’t help thinking
when in a squeaking fleet of bicycles
on the blackest of roads,
tree dark and every second pole
not quite lighting the way home,
bicycles like airplanes in the night.

Is it possible that fighter pilots,
who have never eaten lake trout,
never danced with all of you,
or drank exactly that beer, that way,
feel something like what I’m feeling
swooping in formation
over the empty deeps,
a little capsule of proximities,
a cluster of arts,

each glowing shape nearby
a name and some funny story
they can really only tell each other,
quirks in the mechanism
like faces?

Do they measure speed in terms
of inches closer to catch the scent
of hair and sweat, to hear
the murmur of exertion
before it drifts into the lake?

Of course they don’t;
these are just bicycles and
when we fly,
no one gets hurt.

—JOHN DEGEN

(Originally published summer, 2002.)