Hardy's Bike Poem by Tom Goff

He calls it his “Red Cob”─ American,
the name stemming from a Tennessee
strain of corn, red in the ear, white in the kernel.
The country wellbred think his freethinking
part Yankee heresy part Darwin balderdash,
but in any case, a gloom affected,

poor fellow he’s lost it if he ever had it,
so low of birth. The poor fellow’s right this minute
freewheeling, not so much thinking thinking,
wind-assailed, through Wessex, that is,
Dorset cliffs, pedalling wherever ridgecrest
permits. Alongside him, Emma, sunlit face
reflecting the red of the Cob or the strain of the hill;

she on her Grasshopper with step-through frame, garbed
in green velvet, absurd as Thomas to the town
muffling its smirk with a palm. A way to escape them,
furious whirling or allegro ma non troppo
idling: how can a born poet, a trained novelist,
not relish movable theater, this diorama-cyclorama
slash through life? He can write confident vignettes
of one instant’s glimpse sidelong from the road:
a milkmaid’s underbrush-bent bonnet,
a peddler’s back-deforming knapsack…

So: why so uncertain how Emma now feels as they peel
the landscape? Her hair─ horsewoman’s hair that’d stream
as she faced him obliquely (even her smile sidesaddle)
─ chestnut tresses tumbling crimson in day’s last good light─
now pinchbeck-beneficent under that same sun,
white gold hedged in a green velvet hat…
She who was once all richness and laughter barely

managing a blurt pert breathless retort. Should he,
though then so young, his frame capable
of nothing not found on a spectrum from glint to gleam
to glow, not have reflected: what is it to be a ripe red
cob under a grasshopper’s legs, the brimful kernels
clean white, the grasshopper’s thousand
thousand cousins coming Who knows when
to devour?