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Once there was sky here
Viewed from deer meadows,
And later, pastures
Crisscrossed with cow paths;
And then: rutted tracks a-roar
With motors and horns and auto-commotion,
Carved out to serve the nascent trades,
Vigorous shack- and shed-lined veins;
And next: bricky offices, bars, emporia,
Roadways resurfaced in tar and concrete
To nourish the baby businesses,
To bulk them up--two stories, four . . .
"The sky's the limit!" they said;
But what they meant was:
"We'll limit the sky."
And so it came to pass that,
Little by little, more and more,
The heavens were clamped and sutured up,
Till all we can see now are scars and stitches,
Gray twilit gashes wedged between
Great glassy cubes of enterprise,
Diminishing the starry lid
As it once dwarfed and dominated
The nitspeck humans that skulk beneath it.