The train curved round the valley

That curved around the town.

There thirty years ago a train

Stopped, and I got down.

Like the beginning, I said,

Of a book one might have read.

He looks across the smoke,

Gray over the gray streets,

And guesses under the roofs

People he later meets.

He loves in chapter five,

She dies, and he alive

And his son leave the valley.

He hears of friends gone down

In drink, in wreck, in age,

Unpeopling that town.

The end is damned and done

In the hour it is begun.

I lived in that bloody valley

Of roofs in helpless rage,

And wrote till it was written,

Page after page on page.

I would not know where to look

Now for that old book.