riding our bikes past horse farms
with billboards proclaiming
DANCERS IMAGE
WINNER 1968
KENTUCKY DERBY
the sun-soaked pavement
radiating heat up through
my orbiting feet and legs
matching your pace (a fast
pace, you were a cross country
champ, fitter than me by half)
you threw your head back and
cackled as foals whinnied in
our wakes, calling us to stop
for them with a carrot or an
apple, but today we had neither
it was our first ride that summer
pen pals all year, kept apart by
school, what else? sacrifice our
fall winter spring to our futures
i could have visited you i suppose
exeter was one town over, but
i was a townie, you were a scholar
honors french at a prep school
i was lucky mine taught calculus
we sent emails daily, maybe weekly
when thing got busy (which was
often, and sometimes monthly
during finals, and big papers)
always talking love and romance
never between one another, no
that option always foreclosed by
your on-again-off-again and
my serial monogamy and once
i told you, this time i think it’s
for real and you said “how do you
know what’s real, you’re sixteen”
(after all i was right, you never met)
still furiously peddling, working our
way up the gently sloping hill, horse
farms turning to marshland, reeds
and low grass and mud washed with
the outgoing tide, clear skies meeting
a stand of pines where the ground
rose higher, the salt now overwhelming
omnipresent and variegated amongst
sea and sweat and marsh and the
roadside gravel kicking up under tires
you pushed hard to the top, and i
was way behind you, staring mouth
agape at your ass and thighs, you grinned
back mocking and seeing me down the hill
you slowed a bit, conscious of my labored
huffing and puffing, and now cresting
the hill where the sky and the sea,
split by a thin horizon dividing shades
of azure and teal and emerald and jade,
came into view beneath the steep head
turning north, tires paralleling sea wall
we raced the gannets gulls auks terns
pushing twenty five now, so said my
brand new bike computer (thanks grandma)
“i don’t worry how fast i’m going, i just
push as hard as i can” a typical jibe from you
passing lobster stands and the surf club
and the state beach full of mass plates
we scowled at rhodies massholes mainers
retirees beach bums surf bros townies
the harbor with bobbing trawlers’ nets
hung aloft to dry in the sun, lobster traps
towering stacks bedside piles of buoys
at the point we rolled our bikes across
the lawn, past the parking lot, you shaking
your frizzed curls in the onshore breeze
me trying to pretend like i didn’t notice
your golden skin glistening with sweat
and how your quadriceps filled out
your bright white bike shorts, now
scrambling down the rocks, we’d come
halfway between high and low, sea ebbing,
dozens of tide pools filled with mollusks
and snails and hermits and tiny minnows
no longer than the tip of your pinky’s nail
plucking some or other aquatic creature
i held out my hands and you dropped in it
a crab skittering back and forth between my
cupped palms and when i looked up you
were staring past me at a rocky outcrop
covered in bird shit and cormorants who
one by one dove without hesitation
to fetch some fish or perhaps for fun
your hand on the rocks was licked by
the indolent waves swaying between the
crevices and i thought of drifting my
fingers across yours and why i didn’t
i’m not sure but when i looked back up
you were staring at me and now your
eyes softened with your smile and i
wondered how many more days like this
we’d get before we rode home to our
diverging futures, drifting apart like
hermit crabs in a rising spring tide