Bicycle Poem

Noelle Kocot

There were cathedrals falling out of your eyes
And your arms were the handlebars
I held in an abbreviated dream of crushed petals
Strewn across the limpid avenues.

I said, “I have poems for you”
But my words were lost in the wind.
I said, “I love you”
And you drifted into sleep.

And so I said nothing and rode you in and out of the rooms
Where we had stretched the boundaries of the soul
Like an endless sheet
And I felt you waking up between my legs.

© 1999, Noelle Kocot

Bicycle Poem first appeared in Lit, The Village Voice, Isn't It Romantic?, the Verse Press anthology of Love Poems by younger American poets, and it appears in Noelle Kocot’s first book, 4, winner of the 1999 Levis Prize, published by Four Way Books.

Back to Berlin tomorrow.