Peter Streckfus

 

He found an abandoned motorcycle and brought it home.
He tenderly rebuilt the engine with the help of Mr. Mertz,
the old German bachelor who lived a mile down the way. In
a month, it ran. Ron rode it to town as often as his parents
would allow. On special nights like tonight, an autumn
dance, he would stay out late and ride home by whatever
light the sky provided. Turn off your headlights. If you
wait for the blindness to pass, the road will return. You will
see as Ron saw those nights on his cycle home: the faint,
bobbing ghosts of white deer rumps along the roadside and
then, higher, over a fence; the road white against the dark of
the clover and burdock the deer must have been grazing on.
Needing only that white. He never repaired the headlamp.

Rarely, when another vehicle came along, he saw in the
distance its light, and pulled to the side of the road. He
heard the dance in his head, the music keeping time to the
drone of his engine: off the shoulder, the slight glow of the
passed car’s lamps still in his eyes. His cycle yelling in the
high register of first gear over any other sounds of the night.
The road white beneath him. Dropping into second, he
finally heard the sudden, unlit chug of the oncoming engine.
It clipped his shoulder with its dull, invisible side lamp as
they passed. The cool of the road continued to pass around
him;

the familiar light of distant houses carried him; truly, he slid
through the darkness on that little engine. This was how he
broke his shoulder, though he told them different.

 

Peter Streckfus is the author of two poetry books: Errings, winner of Fordham University Press’s 2013 POL Editor’s Prize, and The Cuckoo, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2003. His poems appear in journals such as The Chicago Review, The New Republic, Seattle Review, and Slate. His awards include fellowships and grants from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the University of Alabama, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Rome where he is a Fellow in Literature. He lives in the Washington DC area with his wife, poet and translator Heather Green, and is on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at George Mason University.