Well, that's enough of that sort of stuff.
This is a poem not too ancient called Mining Town.
And it was the fruit of several visits
to the mining country in Pennsylvania
up around Scranton and Wilkes-Barre,
where some of the towns have been so mined for so many years
that they're all hollow underneath.
And once in a while, a house will
break through the thin crust and just fall down a mineshaft.
And some of the people in these little towns
never know when their house might suddenly tilt up.
It leads for a certain suspense.
Mining Town.
Sheds for machines that lower tons
of men, hug dirt for dear life.
Clapboard houses lose great clapboards the way
a dying oak sheds bark.
One house they tell of plunged nose
down into a shaft last year with cries of sleepers waking,
falling.
Like boys and sneakers testing limber ice,
gas stations growing bold now inch up near.
Who recollects that Kitchen Counter
World straddles pit one?
Dull coal oil-colored clouds graze to the west.
Born in this town, you learn to sleep on edge.
Always on edge, to grow up like a tree
locked to the wind's sharp angle.
When fear tells, it tells out of the corner of an eye.
A rickety house balancing in uncertainty.