On a Bicycle at Dusk

the doorway of the old tool shed where he had been sharpening a broad axe as his daddy and the one before had a hundred years ago. He had made his circle. He was complete —even though we didn't want it— even though he didn't want it. The lines had turned back upon themselves and met but we would never meet in this life again—except in the clicking circular motions of pictures and stories told and retold in our minds. On a Bicycle at Dusk The crescent moon is snagged on a line of pink glowing pinesI ride with it in Schwinn meditation. Streetlights hiss on for dusty satellites. A waxy lady blurs, frowning this time from her blue blurcar. Three swallows chink past me, tumbling high through violet sky. Passing a patch of honeysuckle, I think again of haikus. Faceless people fly by backwards with my breath. I leave my thoughts, too. And go on. -J. J. Cromer Wildacres Writers' Workshop How much we carry up the mountain, winding up the road, the clear air: our lives and those we are creating. We play our roles, leaving behind, stored beneath the kitchen sink, the impedimenta of living in a world that does not heed, or only briefly, the creation of wind in the trees, the shape of mountain in morning mist. What we can't escape we bring with us. We store it in our rooms with our toothpaste, our clean shirts. We bring it out disguised, encapsulated in words as if in specimen bottles on display. "This is how we handle it," we say to ourselves. "This is how we bring it into the sunlight in ordered rows, like rainbows in the curve of the side of the bottle and make it beautiful." In the morning when the breakfast bell rings, when the mountains draw closer and the sky comes down, we walk out in new air where God is almost visible and know that more than grass is growing. -Kinloch Rivers 23 ...