Christian's Song

A compact song of motion, balance, and bodily confidence, using the bicycle as an image of grace, trust, and self-possession.

The poem feels lighter than much of the collection, but its joy is still disciplined and earned rather than carefree.

A bicycle poem of motion and balance in which the rider can 'tell with the wind', 'with the Sun', and 'Seeing through the Moon', riding 'just a breeze / Going up, pursuing flat, going down'. Body and machine fuse - 'My legs are my heart / My heart is my brain' - until 'The body is, a swift sword, / as good as Dartanian'.

Titled 'Christian's Song' and built on 'the sound of the bicycle song', the poem is a rare burst of unguarded physical joy in a collection given to shadowed introspection. Its engine is the collapse of distinctions: legs become heart, heart becomes brain, 'Feet and hands the' same terrain', so that riding becomes a single integrated act rather than a set of efforts. The cycling vocabulary - 'The wait, the thrust, the giving / The arms of balance' - reads as both literal pedaling and a small ethic of trust and equilibrium ('Deliberate and trusting'). The swashbuckling close, comparing the balanced body to a 'swift sword' as good as 'Dartanian' (Dumas's d'Artagnan), gives the poem a child's heroic glee. Keep the spellings 'the'' and 'Dartanian' and the apostrophes exactly as written.