The Bicycle Leaning Up Against the Wall

I'm discovering bicycles at the edge of the picture. Bicycles among the collection of props, not even in focus enough to be minor characters, nearly glanced over. But if it's true that poetry is language distilled to what is essential, and the bicycle made the cut, then its evocative presence speaks of intent. Even at rest, the bicycle is symbol.

Here are two poems where the bicycle is metaphor for what remains when the distillation is complete.

Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre's Boulevard du Temple

by Robin Coste Lewis

(An erasure of Grant Allen's Recalled to Life)

I don't believe

I thought

or gave names

in any known language

I spoke 

of myself always

in the third person.

What led up to it,

I hadn't the faintest idea.

I only knew the Event

itself took place. Constant

discrepancies. To throw them

off, I laughed,

talked--all games

and amusements--to escape

from the burden of my own

internal history.

But I was there

trying for once

to see you,

longed so

to see you.

I might meet you

in the street:

a bicycle leaning

up against the wall

by the window. Rendered

laws of my country

played before my face.

Historical, two-souled,

forgotten, unknown

freaks of memory.

The matter of debts,

the violent death

of a near relation,

and all landing

at the faintest conception.

Dark. Blue. And then.

All I can remember

is when I saw you.

It was you

or anyone else.

The shot

seemed to end

all. It belongs

to the new world:

the Present

all entangled, unable

to move. Everything 

turned round

and looked

at you.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for poetry in 2015 for her book Voyage of the Sable Venus. Below is Daguerre's photograph referenced in the title. It dates from 1838 and is believed to be the first photograph that captures the image of a person.

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye,

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted 

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.