Aaargh-aarghh-aaarggGGH. Up. up. UP. And all at once I place this sound. I heard it thirty years ago in bed: just such a roaring comes with childhood fever. It was background noise for objects that got big, bigger, never biggest—my toy box, my bureau, the side of my mother’s face. Insistent and climbing and unfulfilled. A motorcycle engine, there is something biorhythmic in it. Ears must once have listened so to the heart, the lungs, and been afraid. Surprised by revving blood. Here, at the motocross track in Cairo (K-ro), New York, another system has imposed its strong metabolism. The chest is in empathy; before long I breathe as engines breathe. And, afterward, my brain will feel punch-drunk, bruised. With silence the body tips forward, as if a wall were gone that it had braced against.. Self conscious then,, you can pick up the head’s natural surface noise. A sound of meadow insects, of ear chambers held up like sea shells. And even that seems big, bigger; fevered, too.
They don’t ride. They rough-house, arm-wrestle, haul their bikes along. Legs kick off, kick off; appear to run alongside. Twenty at the start, they whiplash over hard washboarding, then down and through an Indian-file crevasse. Pennants, borrowed perhaps from-some gas station grand opening, tick off each windwake. Below, in the clear stream, a wrecked car wades; given this context it could seem lovely, something grown. Fishtail and sidewind, carom and career and careen, up the long hill, then, slice, across a water trap. Engines come out steamy as exhales in the cold; Through another slough. Over the big ramp, popping wheelies, unicycling, for one moment free. Twenty men, fifteen, ten; down to single digits now. Some lie ungainly, comic, in the listless mud. Others have been taken out by metal: a shaft, a valve, bent or swollen or simply gone. Even thigh to thigh they are alone. They move in a deep privacy, the man and the machine.
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