You must remember, Pittsburgh is not like this, would never have been found without the rod bending right here, sucked down by the earth. This is not the thick push of the three rivers’ water hard as name calling; Allegheny, Susquehanna and the old Monongahela, though I keep losing the Ohio. This is the Saugus River, cut by Captain Kidd’s keel, bore up the ore barge heavy
the whole way from Nahant. Mad Atlantic bends its curves to touch our feet, oh anoints. Slag makes a bucket bottom feed iron rings unto water, ferric oxides, clouds of rust. But something here there is pale as dim diviner’s image, a slight knob and knot of pull at a forked and magic willow.
You see it when smoke floats a last breath over the river road, the furnace bubbling upward
a bare acidic tone for flue. With haze, tonight, the moon crawls out of Vinegar Hill, the slag pile throws eyes a thousand in the shining, charcoal and burnt lime thrust thick as wads up a nose.
Sound here’s the moon burning iron again, pale embers of the diviner’s image loose upon the night. Oh, reader, you must remember, Pittsburgh is not like this.
—
Daderot at English Wikipedia
