w.s.w. premium tires. One owner. $1,595.

IV

He made it to the age of torqueflite radio

but not much past that, and never in that town.

That was mine to know, Main Street lined with

Rocket Eighty-eights,

the dimestore floored with wooden planks

pies under plastic in the Soda Shop,

and the mystery untold, the other thing,

sensed in the creaking of a sign after midnight

when nobody else was there.

In the talc-fine dust beneath the platform of the

Norfolk & Western

lay indian-head pennies undisturbed since

the dawn of man.

In the banks and courthouse, a fossil time

prevailed, limestone centuries.

When I went up to Toronto

in the draft,

my Local Board was there on Main Street,

above a store that bought and sold pistols.

I'd once traded that man a derringer for a

Walther P-38.

The pistols were in the window

behind an amber roller-blind

like sunglasses.

I was seventeen or so but basically I guess

you just had to be a white boy.

I'd hike out to a shale pit and run

ten dollars worth of 9mm

through it, so worn you hardly

had to pull the trigger.

Bored, tried shooting

down into a distant stream but

one of them came back at me

off a round of river rock

clipping walnut twigs from a branch

two feet above my head.

So that I remembered the mechanism.

V.

In the all night bus station

they sold scrambled eggs to state troopers

the long skinny clasp-knives called fruit knives

which were pearl handled watermelon-slicers

and hillbilly novelties in brown varnished wood

which were made in Japan.

First I'd be sent there at night only

if Mom's carton of Camels ran out,

but gradually I came to value

the submarine light, the alien reek

of the long human haul, the strangers

straight down from Port Authority

headed for Nashville, Memphis, Miami.

Sometimes the Sheriff watched them get off

making sure they got back on.

When the colored restroom

was no longer required

they knocked open the cinderblock

and extended the magazine rack

to new dimensions,

a cool fluorescent cave of dreams

smelling faintly and forever of disinfectant,

perhaps as well of the travelled fears

of those dark uncounted others who,

moving as though contours of hot iron,

were made thus to dance

or not to dance

as the law saw fit.

There it was that I was marked out as a writer,

having discovered in that alcove

copies of certain magazines

esoteric and precious, and, yes,

I knew then, knew utterly,

the deal done in my heart forever,

though how I knew not,

nor ever have.

Walking home

through all the streets unmoving

so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away:

the mechanism.

Nobody else, just the silence

spreading out

to where the long trucks groaned

on the highway

their vast brute souls in want.

VI.

There must have been a true last time

I saw the station but I don't remember

I remember the stiff black horsehide coat

gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin

I remember the cold

I remember the Army duffle

that was lost and the black man in Buffalo

trying to sell me a fine diamond ring,

and in the coffee shop in Washington

I'd eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie

embroidered with red roses

that I have looked for ever since.

They must have asked me something

at the border

I was admitted

somehow

and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter

across the very sky

and I went free

to find myself

mazed in Victorian brick

amid sweet tea with milk

and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat

and every unknown brand of chocolate

and girls with blunt-cut bangs

not even Americans

looking down from high narrow windows

on the melting snow

of the city undreamed

and on the revealed grace

of the mechanism,

no round trip.

They tore down the bus station

there's chainlink there

no buses stop at all

and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku

in a typhoon

the fine rain horizontal

umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath

tonight red lanterns are battered,

laughing,

in the mechanism.