They start working at dawn, the proofreaders and city stylists.
They mow the lawns,
paint the facades of buildings,
reconnect broken cables,
read the streets line by line
like professionals:
this dog should not be here, let’s take it off;
let’s add a newsstand between these two trees,
and down there, at the end of the street
a trash can should be placed but
let’s change the street name.
Right there we need to correlate a supermarket with its original text—
citations from American life,
those the city just recently approved.
Frankly, many tasks wait to be done,
but not out of weakness.
Every morning there’s a steady diligence;
they stick their noses in the dusty volumes and
do their never-ending jobs:
replace the street tiles,
re-paint billboards in accordance with each holiday,
hang the street signs
and, finally, bring this stylistically corrected
city to the Night Editor for publishing.