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On the way to work,
I drive down a street where I lived,
when I was an initiate Canadian.
The house in question sits
beside a spur-line connecting
Kitchener and Waterloo.

I recall walking those rails
on the way to downtown Kitchener
and it was a surprisingly hot
December day, my twelfth birthday.

Five of us were off to see a movie.
We placed pennies on the track,
waited for a train to turn them
into thin copper sheets.

There is inertia in the movement
of boxcars supplying commerce
and time is impossible to stop,
turning reality into shivers
of what once occurred.

Like the slope across the road
from that early home,
where I tobogganed the winter
of 1953. It was an Alpine slope,
today just a dip, easily negotiated
by a good Sears lawnmower.