one other summer in an attic trunk,

and beneath that every boy's best treasure

of tarnished actual ammunition

real little bits of war

but also

the mechanism

itself.

The blued finish of firearms

is a process, controlled, derived from common

rust, but there

under so rare and uncommon a patina

that many years untouched

until I took it up

and turning, entranced, down the unpainted

stair,

to the hallway where I swear

I never heard the first shot.

The copper-jacketed slug recovered

from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder of

Morton's Salt

was undeformed

save for the faint bright marks of lands

and grooves

so hot, stilled energy,

it blistered my hand.

The gun lay on the dusty carpet.

Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up

That the second shot, equally unintended,

notched the hardwood bannister and brought

a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life

in a beam of dusty sunlight.

Absolutely alone

in awareness of the mechanism.

Like the first time you put your mouth

on a woman.

III.

"Ice Gorge at Wheeling

1917"

Iron bridge in the distance,

Beyond it a city.

Hotels where pimps went about their business

on the sidewalks of a lost world.

But the foreground is in focus,

this corner of carpenter's Gothic,

these backyards running down to the freeze.

"Steamboat on Ohio River",

its smoke foul and dark,

its year unknown,

beyond it the far bank

overgrown with factories.

"Our Wytheville

House Sept. 1921"

They have moved down from Wheeling and my father wears his

city clothes. Main Street is unpaved and an electric streetlamp is