On the Difficulty of Pumping High-Octane Gasoline into a ’39 Buick Century without Spilling a Drop

This summer at the Junction in Neon he pumps gas.

It’s 1939. Mantle isn’t famous yet. He’s still a kid.

In Commerce, Oklahoma, he’s having a picture taken.

On a pony at a fairground. My pops is seven, a boy.

Twelve-cent-a-gallon high-test, leaving the nozzle,

sounds like whispering his name, Roy. He leans in.

The trick is to lean against the curve of fender, wave

all of Kentucky quiet, the showroom-shiny car body

filling with mirror-reversed Pure Oil logos, shimmers

of blue and white in twelve coats of pre-war lacquer.

Ear to the sun-warm Buick, it seems almost magical:

holding the Buckeye Iron & Brass nozzle, waiting

a series of dulcet whooshings of air in the tank neck.

Done wrong, a bucket of bees dispensed into a hive.

The sidemount reshapes his face in a bend of chrome.

A mannish face. Black, tossled hair. Something else.

The reason Nigger Fats, moonshiner, has asked for

“that little Bentley boy, what respects a wax job.”