a good read

from one of the mail lists.
an understanding of older machinery helps but it's fairly universal and
well written for any rider to appreciate:


*/Norton the Fossil


/**/The old Nortons were a great joy to ride. The simple act of timing
one of these noble cycles is somewhat like fastening oneself to the
great metronome of the universe.

/ --Sir Cydney Davies
/GREAT MACHINES
OF THE OCCIDENTAL
WORLD


/Breathing old bones of vertebrates, leaves,
dead fish,
hundreds of puffs in a second
of space
you prolong this dimension of feeling
non time.
Your shiny fabrications sliding on juices of
other bones,
you push through passes
of arid trails:
cemented hard fossils of
other bones
poured in measured, leveled, and striped
crusts of white
baking in bright solstice sun that
melts them all;
that will have me and the steel of your
enameled ribs
all browned and blown to
desert dust.


Who on hands and knees dug you
out of time,
moved the metals from their buried places
on the chart
to crucibles of molten heat for sandy casts
of future forms?
Who cooled you to hardness in dark
humid halls
where magnets and motors moved you to long lines
of boxes on wheels?
What steelie eye lathed you from reels of round
precision
after blueprint fashions of mathematician's theory
of acceleration?
Who in the final formula for forms
of the ribs
skeletal structures of rubber and steel--dead trees
and dead earth--
numbered your parts for the making
of motion?

The shocks of your movement now perfect
in time--
from jungle trees that bled
warm gum,
from mountain ores, blue-black bones of coal
for fire,
to hammers, scrapers, chisels, millers, driven
from long lines
of electrons pulsing their way through conical bondings of
molecules
where two-pronged plugs poured energy of other bones
to shape you--
you freeze the clock at constant thrust
of change.
Through winds you make yourself you carry me, one
yet to melt
in soaring sun, on rides from death you drive
to life
on glistening rims of spider spokes too fast for light
to find.
*================================================= =========
*/Lee Schultz
/**["Norton the Fossil." /New Texas `91/. Denton: Univ. of North
Texas Press, 1991.]
* The above went through about 160 drafts before being
selected for the anthology. It was the least I could do
for the Old Nort.
================================================== =====