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