apologia with Neruda

I won't be posting any more today (she said, hoping), because days when I post more than four times make me feel dirty, and you wouldn't like me when I'm dirty. (Okay, that came out weirder than intended. Hush.) Yesterday was post frenzy and today is post quiet. Better?

I'm meeting my two chapters goal again today, thank you very much.

Seeing the boys jostle across the pave yesterday was quite something; it's never a bad time to be looking at Big George Hincapie -- he should always be leading the pack. Today we are on Tour news black-out, because we're having someone over later to watch the sure-to-be-exciting team time trial. It is very hard not to look at news.

In honor of my and Pablo Neruda's birthday, which is coming up Monday, July 12, another poem. The occasion would have been his 100th (or will be, I guess, but I doubt he's counting), but not nearly so momentous for me. Nonetheless:

Ode to Bicycles

I was walking
down
a sizzling road:
the sun popped like
a field of blazing maize,
the
earth
was hot,
an infinite circle
with an empty
blue sky overhead.

A few bicycles
passed
me by,
the only
insects
in
that dry
moment of summer,
silent,
swift,
translucent;
they
barely stirred
the air.

Workers and girls
were riding to their
factories,
giving
their eyes
to summer,
their heads to the sky,
sitting on the
hard
beetle backs
of the whirling
bicycles
that whirred
as they rode by
bridges, rosebushes, brambles
and midday.

I thought about evening when
the boys
wash up,
sing, eat, raise
a cup
of wine
in honor
of love
and life,
and waiting
at the door,
the bicycle,
stilled,
because
only moving
does it have a soul,
and fallen there
it isn't
a translucent insect
humming
through summer
but
a cold
skeleton
that will return to
life
only
when it's needed,
when it's light,
that is,
with
the
resurrection
of each day.

--Pablo Neruda