WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS The first real grip I ever got on things Was when I learned the art of pedalling (By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove Its back wheel preternaturally fast. I loved the disappearance of the spokes, The way the space between the hub and rim Hummed with transparency. If you threw A potato into it, the hooped air Spun mush and drizzle back into your face; If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered. Something about the way those pedal treads Worked very palpably at first against you And then began to sweep your hand ahead Into a new momentum -- that all entered me Like an access of free power, as if belief Caught up and spun the objects of belief In an orbit coterminous with longing. But enough was not enough. Who ever saw The limit in the given anyhow? In fields beyond our house there was a well ("The well" we called it. It was more a hole With water in it, with small hawthorn trees On one side, and a muddy, dungy ooze On the other, all tramped through by cattle). I loved that too. I loved the turbid smell, The sump-life of the place like old chain oil. And there, next thing, I brought my bicycle. I stood its saddle and its handlebars Into the soft bottom, I touched the tyres To the water's surface, then turned the pedals Until like a mill-wheel pouring at the treadles (But here reversed and lashing a mare's tail) The world-refreshing and immersed back wheel Spun lace and dirt-suds there before my eyes And showered me in my own regenerate clays. For weeks I made a nimbus of old glit. Then the hub jammed, rims rusted, the chain snapped. Nothing rose to the occasion after that Until, in a circus ring, drumrolled and spotlit, Cowgirls wheeled in, each one immaculate At the still centre of a lariat. "Perpetuum mobile." Sheer pirouette. Tumblers, Jongleurs, Ring-a-rosies. "Stet!" -- Seamus Heaney, born Mossbawn, Co. Derry, 1939