or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without emotion save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum- which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder

that she’ll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs—

some doctor’s family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken

brain the truth about us— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off

No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car”