~ George Oppen
 
A zero, a nothing, a barbarity —

Cars on the highway filled with speech,

The darkness of trees.
The extreme from up-state

(Grateful for a breeze):

He who will not work shall not eat.
It is the air of atrocity,

A kind of garden like a flat

Sea. My daughter, my _______,
What can I say? Myth of the blaze, myself I sing:

Now we do most of the killing.

Of such deadly ancestry,
Preceded by mounted police,

Quotations, the resistance,

Survival: Infantry.
Tell the beads of chromosomes

(Like a rosary):

Ultimately, the air

Visits what ends —

You are the last,

The Z.