HE WAS THE town. He was the town compounded and reduced, refined to its essences, its odors and its strewing.
He walked through the town or ran through the town any hour of the day or night, whenever the whim took him, when the moon drew him with its nocturnal tides or the sun brought him like a carved animal from a Swiss clock. He was small; with a handle you could have carried him like a black valise. And he was hairy as copper-wool, steel-wool, shavings and brushes. And he was never silent when he could be loud.
He came home from the cold night lake with a smell of water in his pelt. He came from the sands and shook a fine dust of it under the bed. He smelled of June rain and October maple leaves and Christmas snows and April rains. He was the weather, hot or cold. He fetched it back from wherever he was, wherever he had been. The smell of brass; he had lounged against fire station poles amid intervals of tobacco spitting and come home feverish from political conversation. The smell of marble; he had trotted through the cool tombs of the court house. The smell of oil; he had lain in the cool lubrication pit at the gas station, away from summer. Frosted like a birthday cake he entered from January. Baked like a rabbit he came in from July with world-shaking messages buried in his clock-spring hair.
But mostly he followed the Revolution; he moved in the sounds and shadowing of boys, and more often than not, his tongue slickly protruding in a smile, he wore a hand, like a white hat, moving, on his head