It's actually Washington, DC.
And now, to go very far away in time,
so to speak, to one of these crummy,
bleak New England mill towns.
This afternoon, I was sort of thinking what to read,
and it just struck me that some of these
poems that are so alien, so foreign, so different because
of just the landscape out my door or my window.
These are places that are--
this is what's left of the Industrial Revolution,
places abandoned by industry even 50 years ago
and have never recovered.
So this is one--
this is a place like that, which is close to where I live.
And the poem is called "Toward Nightfall."
"The weight of tragic events on everyone's
back, just as tragedy in the proper Greek sense
was thought impossible to compose in our day.
There were scaffolds, makeshift stages, puny figures on them,
like small indistinct animals caught in the headlights.
Crossing the roadway ahead in the gray twilight,
they went on hesitating on the verge of a huge stylized autumn
night.
One could have been in a backhoe, an open truck,
hunkering because of the speed and chill.
One could have been walking with a sidelong
glance at the many troubling shapes
the bare trees made, like those about to shriek,
but finding themselves unable to utter a word now.
One could have been in one of these dying mill
towns, inside a small dim gross city when the news broke.
One drew near the radio with the one many months pregnant
who serves there at that hour.
Was there a smell of spilled blood in the air
or was it that other much finer scent
of fear, the fear of approaching death one met
in the empty street?
Monsters and movie posters too, prominently displayed.
Then, six factory girls, arm in arm,
laughing as if they'd been drinking.
At the very least, one could have been one of them.
The one with a mouth painted bright red,
who feels out of sorts for no reason,
very pale and so excusing herself,
vanishes where it says 'rooms for rent'
and immediately goes to bed fully dressed,
only to lie with eyes open, trembling despite the covers.
It's just a bad show, she keeps telling herself,
not having seen the papers which the landlord has the dog bring
from the front porch.
The old man never learned to read well and so
reads on in that half whisper and in that half light verging
on the dark about that day's tragedies,
which supposedly are not tragedies
in the absence of figures endowed
with classic nobility of soul."