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Previously
published in Fire No. 24, 2004
ISSN:1367
031X and What Moves Moves
Shoestring
Press, 2004. ISBN: 1 904886 05 1
The Bicycle Garden
The
graves of children who go missing
are
abandoned bicycles set in concrete
bases
lowered into shallow trenches
by
the railway bridge and left to rust.
The
engineer (retired) who tends
the
place says visitors are few—
he
imagines parents driving slowly by
or
peering through the wire-mesh fence
for
a particular shade of paint or rake
of
handlebar, but they don’t come in.
And
there it was, this gaunt tableau
of
BMXs, racers, mountain bikes,
an
aged Vespa with its fairing crushed,
and
tricycles with tassels tied to handlegrips
or
crossbars, where they stayed, seeming,
to
those who looked, to rise up from the ground
or
sink into it. You turn away—
because
there’s no such garden, though
the
bicycles are often all that’s found.
An
end-page columnist invented it,
when
it seemed to him society
was
waging war on being young,
on
children who enticed and let you
down.
So he dreamed a garden for them,
and
the engineer was somehow odd
enough
to make the whole thing real,
a
sleight that left its maker lying
with
the silence in his ears, as if
some
violence had been done.
Paul McLoughlin
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