March 14, 2004

• cycling makes a way
  
  Liu Xian steps outside and shakes his feet, each in turn, whipping the sleep out of him.  It is animation found in the concrete Communist confines of his backyard draped by a grey sky.  He breathes, taking in the smell of his neighbor’s cooking, up early to sell fried squid in the marketplace.  Over the weak reception of a radio or maybe an old record, he buttons up his silk-blue jacket, running his hands over his sleeves, making them smooth and all to the rhythm and sound of a beautiful, tonal song.  State-sponsored, the song is yet like a trip thirty miles out into the countryside, rolling up and down in random places, little ditches staggered between subtle mounds.  He has a new Schwinn bike.  Walking it down narrow congested streets, he greets his neighbors and rings his bell, concerned and happy for his appearance.

   

  There are puddles everywhere, glistening masses.  He walks carefully around them.
  
  There is a pig in the window, hanging from his feet, ready to drop and handstand his way to the night’s banquet.  Ghostly and pink, the pig stares at the ground.  Sitting quietly, the butcher’s wife smiles, black teeth grinning, white hair tied tightly, held in place by a whittled chopstick.

   

  Sleep leaves him and in a concrete Communist jungle, he’s wrapped up by a slew of tiny trucks pulling government goods and on the main street, a steady torrent of bikes, rusty and weighty.  He waits patiently and considers the baggage train of small-eyed people spitting, smoking, and making their way to work as assigned.

   

  His thick black bottlecap glasses are the stuff of hip-cat dreams and he wipes them, holding them up to the clouds.  They are lightly smeared with the sediment of factory air.  His breath comes forth like a raspy whisper, coughed up sweet and intentional.

   

  On his Schwinn, then.  He finds an opening and becomes one silk-blue blur in a collective grey of puffy winter coats.  Hi Liu.  Hi Teng.  Hi Chang.  Hi Chu. 

   

  You look good and I do too.

   

  As they ride, the pack thins out as friends and fellow journeymen make a way toward assigned places.  In their factories, they are making pieces of door handles, fake porcelain cups, stretched rubber shoes, and bullets for making a burgundy point.

   

  He rides out of the city and on thin tires, skitters along the damp walkways flanked by rice and bended backs.  Humming the tonal song, he rides along a sparse industrial highway.  Working his way up the on-ramp, he feels the tires work their design.  Standing up and leaning forward, he grabs the ram’s horns and churns his legs.

   

  On his Schwinn, then.  On the freeway.  He cruises down the middle-lane flanked by mountains and Soviet tanks, their turrets twisted off like bottlecaps and the generations of men lost with them. The smouldering is aged and gone and he marvels at a fading red star.  He juts a defying tongue and tastes the snow that shakes softly as it coats him with sharp delicate layers.  Dapper among billions, he is the only one there.  And then there.  And then there, hunched over the curved handles, fighting the unsteady grade of a mountain.
  
  —

   

    

   

  
  
  —
  
  coal
  
  Anvil taking it

  Like a man,

  Hammers start swinging

  Because they can.
  
  

  Miners are rising

  At the start of day,
  Pulling blinds
  To know the weather.

   

  The horizon is peeking
  Reclining like a body
  Hitting their knees

  Like lunch pails.

   

  Platform dropping

  Tugging at shadows,
  They’re craning their necks,
  Remembering the beginning.
  
      It took the form
      Of a sliver of light.
  
  

  Joking and smoking
  Axes are grinding
  For a puff of dust.
  
  —

  
  
  The Forge (F. Goya)
  
  —
  
  Ecclesiastes 11:7-8
  
  Light is sweet,
    and it pleases the eye to see the
             sun.
  
  —
  
  I’d like to sleep in.  I nodded off just waiting for my toast today.  Click.  It would be cool if we could stop time.  It’s nice to stop and breathe.
  
  —
  
  listening to:
  
  
   let’s roll
  
  

   

   ! Matt11:28

   

  • 4:31 am
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