Eleven short lines, one breath, one downhill ride. The speaker swings onto a motorcycle, hangs on, and coasts down Grizzly Peak through gusts of blossom and pine. The rider ahead, Henry, turns and shouts something. The speaker shouts "yes" back without having heard a word. The poem ends not on the view or a moral but on a small burn, with the leg "stinging with wind." Its central idea seems to be a wholehearted assent to experience, pain included, given before the terms are fully understood. The speaker says yes first and finds out the cost afterwards.
The form suits that attitude. The poem is a single stanza with no rhyme and almost no punctuation apart from the apostrophe in "'cause." Nothing slows the reader down, so the sentences tumble into each other the way a descent does. The line breaks mimic the movements they describe. "I throw my leg" ends a line and leaves the leg hanging in mid-air, and only the next line lets it land "Over the motorcycle." Then "And hang on" gets a line of its own, abrupt as a grip tightening. It works literally, as a rider's instruction, and also as a stance toward whatever comes next.
The opening phrase, "Stirring up dirt," is grammatically loose. We can't quite tell whether the speaker, the wheels, or the whole moment is doing the stirring, and that vagueness joins rider and machine into one churning motion. The best image comes a few lines later: "we hit air / pockets of plum blossom and pine." An air pocket is a term from flying, a sudden drop in turbulence, so the ride briefly becomes flight. But these pockets are made of scent, and the verb "hit" turns smell into something solid the bike runs through. The sweetness of blossom meets the sharpness of pine, and the repeated p-sounds in "pockets," "plum," and "pine" burst like the small pops of air they describe. Judging by the blossom, the poem seems set in spring, though it never says so.
Then comes the exchange with Henry, the only moment of speech. There are no quotation marks, so the shouting blends into the noise of the ride. The line "I shout yes I shout yes" repeats itself as if the speaker were making sure, and only afterward comes the casual confession, "'cause I didn't hear him." The comedy lies in that delay. The reader first sees a confident answer, then learns it was a guess. Wind and engine have stripped the words away, and what passes between the two riders is closer to tone and trust than to information. The poem doesn't explain who Henry is, and it doesn't need to. The speaker's easy agreement, and Henry's willingness to turn around mid-descent to ask, suggest a comfortable closeness.
The ending quietly reorganises everything. "My leg stinging with wind / Where I burned it on tailpipe" is the only past-tense moment in a poem that has been running in the present, and it points back to the opening gesture. The burn likely came from that first throw of the leg over the bike, though the poem leaves us to infer it. The cost of getting on was paid at the start, but we learn of it only at the end, once the speaker is already moving too fast to turn back. There is a neat irony, too: the wind that carried the blossom and made the ride exhilarating is now what stings. Pleasure and pain arrive through the same leg at the same moment. The clipped "on tailpipe," without a "the," sounds like real speech, and the final word is hard and mechanical, a world away from plum blossom. Nothing is added to tell us how to feel about the injury, and the poem doesn't complain or boast.
That restraint is what makes it worth reading. The title is just a row of asterisks, a placeholder that fits a poem about a passing moment. It offers no reflection and no lesson. A burned leg, a shouted yes, and a lungful of pine carry the whole attitude. Many poems try to say what it means to be fully present. This one shows a person too busy hanging on to explain, and the quick, unpolished honesty of that picture is its achievement.