Late for the morning ferry,
my only hope this aging motorcycle
I haven’t ridden much lately.
It’s damp, cold—tough
on the elderly battery.
Flip choke,
pull clutch handle,
turn key,
push ignition.
Venerable 1100 turns over,
not too bad for a first try.
By the fourth,
just a spent groan,
dimmed lights.
Dammit!
Then, something never dared
over years of our relationship.
I stop, breathe, lean down
with leather hands,
embrace the outer carbs,
cylinders, spark plug wires.
I send my sweet old bike
love, and ask her to start.
She fires right up.
It happened just like that. The motorcycle is an old Suzuki, a failed low rider Harley knockoff, but a great old bulletproof bike nonetheless. When she was a child, my daughter named this bike “Motory.” Although it used to be my main commuter transportation (before I started commuting on a bicycle and our community got transit), it was also my secret way in to a modestly wild life style.
With the old ABMC (Aging Bureaucrats Motorcycle Club), I’d tear around the swooping roads of Eastern Washington’s wheatfields, and up into British Columbia. Ride hard, die free! Such trips were mostly excuses to collect good cafe references, camp in the desert, and shoot the shit with friends. Those days are mostly gone, but overtones remain when I climb onto my old bike. She’s mostly used for convenience now, but I try to keep her cleaned up and in a semblance of shape, more or less as I treat myself. Hmmm.
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