Limited, Inc.

On a trip to Tuscany The world is large, and the chopper is narrow and particular, hungry for fact and its destruction, its work in rents and the long failure of maintenance. In the slow small train from Florence to Siena, I looked out and saw a familiar scene, something I’d witness on the train from New Haven to New York, something I’d seen in Gary Indiana: I witnessed the chopper, extensively, giving the human landscape its forty whacks with shocking persistence. Wack go th e brick walls, wack go the rooftrees, wack go the old railroad cars strayed on rusty sidetracks, wack go the tiles, wack goes the tin piping, down it all tinkles and back to the various toxins out of which they were fabricated goes the matter. The air is hot, the sky is blue, and the smoke that was once the accompaniment of economic life is gone, along with that life. What is left is graffiti and a hard look, and these abandoned warehouses and houses, their interior structures in glimpses, like the skeleton