I’ve owned several old motorcycles
with worn engines that sounded like coin bang
in washing machines — I rode an oily gray bike
before the mustard brown and my hard green Italian — .
but this is what happened on the white bike
while moving in and out of rains
in a twenty-five mile an hour curve
as I kept going toward Big Sur with some bad words
and some other words that I had — A rough line
about a swollen man on an ocean road where the hills
washed down to the sea in a race with a storm.
Then it got late near Big Sur — I hadn’t written
for a while — and could only give it a day …