It was like this once: sprinklers mixed our marigolds with someone else's phlox, and the sidewalks under maple trees were lacy with August shade, and whistles called at eight and fathers walked to work, and when they blew again, men in tired blue shirts followed their shadows home to grass. That is how it was in Indiana. Towns fingered out to country once, where brown-eyed daisies waves a fringe on orchards and cattle munched at clover, and fishermen sat in rowboats and were silent, and on gravel roads, boys and girls stopped their cars and felt the moon and touched, and the quiet moments ringed and focused lakes       moon       flowers. That is how it was in Indiana. But we are moving out now, scraping the world smooth where apples blossomed, paving it over for cars. In the spring before the clover goes purple, we mean to scrape the hayfield, and next year the hickory woods: we are pushing on, our giant diesels snarling, and I think of you, the billions of you, wrapped in your twenty-first century concrete, and I want to call to you, to let you know that if you dig down, down past wires and pipes and sewers and subways, you will find a crumbly stuff called earth. Listen: in Indiana once, things grew in it.