"Memory at 'The Modern'"

We had seen bare land
And the people bare on it
And men camp
In the city. The lights,
The pavement, this important device
Of a race, I wrote then,
Twenty three years old,
Remains till morning. Nobody knows who died
On the road of that time, of the fact of roads.
I am a man of the Thirties

'no other taste shall change this'

- George Oppen
from New Collected Poems, page 295