Hot Wheelin'

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It’s a small paperback book of love poems, small enough to slip inside your purse, or maybe a wide pocket. Small but potent. Desire drips off the pages. Lust leaps from verse to verse. These are juicy, saucy love poems, playful, hopeful and occasionally raw. They ooze with the “I’ve gotten around” savvy of a 65-year-old woman.

I bought Nikki Giovanni’s book of love poems as a gift for my husband, but I really bought it because of the title, Bicycles, and the cover— a sexy photo of a fire engine red vintage-style cruiser, with seductive curves and small cheery flowers on the fenders. It’s a happy bike, and I’m a sucker for bicycles. In the cover photo, Giovanni, with her close-cropped gray hair, café-au-lait skin and sassy red lipstick, dressed like David Byrne in a baggy white linen suit, is holding on to the chrome handlebars, looking down, chuckling to herself: “Yea baby, we’re going for a ride,” she seems to be saying.

Inside the book, each of the 65 poems ends with a small black-and-white graphic of the bike from the cover, jauntily akimbo on its kickstand. Sometimes the bike graphic is centered in white space after the last line of the poem, sometimes it’s smaller and off to the side, tucked at a bottom corner by the page number. It moves around page to page, as if parked willy-nilly after the poet has hopped off. Bikes symbolically punctuate the book, a repetitive visual presence, but only the title poem mentions the word bicycle: “Midnight poems are bicycles/Taking us on safer journeys/Than jets/Quicker journeys/Than walking/But never as beautiful/A journey/As my back/Touching you under the quilt…”. The only other reference is a short epigram in a tiny font—easy to overlook. “Bicycles: because love requires trust and balance,” the poet explains.

Yes, bicycles: Because I was first smitten by a blue Schwinn with a cushy fat seat when I was seven. Bicycles: Because love means taking chances, falling off, getting back on, looking both ways. Bicycles: Because I’ve adored every bike I’ve had since that first Schwinn, including my 1976 red, white and blue Bicentennial edition 10-speed Varsity, followed by a used Carolina blue 12-speed road bike that I pedaled through the Blue Ridge mountains one summer in college. Bicycles: Because love requires a willingness to get on and go, to use brakes wisely, to endure sore quads. Bicycles: Because they’re so simple, yet can be so complex, especially if you’re trying to buy a new one, as I was recently, and ego and vanity begin to cloud the relationship.