Provincetown Fourth

Here we are in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving their pulp to pittance at a gas station in the city that never peeps— and here is the city with its Martians in leather and excoriated thunderbolt- boas, its Bible-trippers, its vintage bazookas for barter not sale, its reluctance to be reluctant, its speed for hire, into which we atrophy ourselves to briefly fit— and we are never so close to the joys of oil, the grease inside which a fat becomes a fit, as we bellow magnanimously praise on the least well of those who pass, ones who are dying we salute: we are coming from the war, they are going to the war—