you cease to smell the steel plant

after you've lived there for a while

smoke is snow is ash are leaves that blow

through the air aloft

all our houses dim their sliding

to the same soot gray style

and we hang our laundry out on sundays

when they turn the furnaces off



everybody's daddy works up on the line

the stienbrenners and the wilczewskis

have been there the longest time

everybody's mommy squints into the sun

sunday afternoon after all the laundry's done



sometimes a distant siren

can set a dog to barking late at night

then it dominos on down

til every dog is joining in

the first rumours of the layoffs

sang like a distant siren might

and we all perked up our ears

and paced the fence

of the ensuing din



every night, we were glued to the tv news

at six o'clock

cuz it was hard to tell what was real

and what was talk

they explained about the cutbacks

all the earnest frowns

but what they didn't say was that the plant

was slowly shutting down



this town is not the kind of place

that money people go

they make their jokes up on the tv

about all the snow

and they're building condos downriver

from where the plant had been

but nobody really lives here

now that the air is clean



the president assured us

it was all gonna trickle down

like it'd be raining so much money

that we'd be sad to see the sun

mr. wilczewski's brother had some business

out in denver

so they left denver

and everybody knows they were the lucky ones



you cease to smell the steel plant

after you'v ebeen here for a while