Bicycle Arpeggios
by Kim Trainor
For almost a year now I have been trying to write this poem
about the bicycles at dusk, a clattering gamelan’s
rhythm of give and take at the lake’s edge, those stripped
bikes converted into instruments—the bell and
tock of pedals, the clicking gears as one rider yielded
to the next, leg bones converting energy into
mechanical song. And some would ride their bicycle
as fast as they could go, and others drag out the broken
chords. You would have understood this music as I
could only listen. How beautiful and complicated humans are.
I mean to say that you are. I don’t know you at all
so how is it that I feel as if I’ve always known? Each time
I mean to study you, to learn everything about you
as I would learn a bicycle or a poem, but when I am
with you I am overcome, and can only
absorb you like water. I might recall a fragment—
the olive skin of your hands, your scuffed shoes.
But then I can’t even remember what clothes
you wore, your wrists, the colour of your eyes.
So I need to see you again, and again, although
I know you are not meant for me, to study
every beautiful and complicated part.
And as you were not there to see it (how could I not
have known that you existed on this earth?)
I would like to include in this poem for you, how,
when it became very dark, tiny hot air balloons
were released here and there around the lake. They floated up
over the bicycle gamelan and the black lake water
and the stilt walkers and the gypsy band, higher
and higher until they could no longer be seen anymore,
until they were extinguished by the beautiful night.
Kim Trainor’s poems have appeared most recently in Grain, Qwerty, and The Dalhousie Review. She won The Fiddlehead’s 2013 Ralph Gustafson Prize and was co-winner of the 2013 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. She has recently completed a first collection of poetry, entitled Karyotype. With the exception of five rather cold years in Montreal, she has always lived in Vancouver.