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One departed wind, timbers crossing a pond, dying steel, natural aluminum, and the raw-material sound collapse into murder disguised by romantic rock and roll, with children named as first victims.

The poem begins like the other Near pieces, with industry reduced to weathered matter and a single leaving wind. The handwritten crossing pond line makes the page feel interrupted by another current before it snaps into naked extermination. Romantic rock and roll becomes the soundtrack of denial, a culture playing while it destroys its own future.

The first of the clustered 'Near' poems opens in worn industrial elegy - 'There is only one wind / And that is the one / that has left,' 'Steel sought it8s last Sun,' 'Alumian is natural.' The handwritten continuation 'and spans into the / crossing pond' threads water through the timber before the page detonates. The catalogue of materials - 'Rag materials / Has a sound to it' - gives way without transition to genocidal command: 'Kill the son of bitches / Irish and Columbian / Kill the kids first.' The closing indicts the culture that anesthetizes itself - 'Weplay romantic rock and roll / while we murder' - the elided 'Weplay' fusing the soundtrack to the slaughter.