From “The Bourgeois Poet”

Not at all my favorite author, Kipling described Chicago once: the water
   is the water of the Hooghly, and the air is dirt. And a famous
   poet of New England whom I drive to the station: it’s a grand
   city. (Grand, a nineteenth-century word.)
Under its permanent umbrella of travail, Chicago swirls in grit. Smuts
   drift in the sky, penetrate window-glass, light on petals of window-
   box flowers, turning geraniums pansy-black. All is charred, all is
   furred with dirt, the sky winter and summer streaked like the skylight
   of the grandest railroad station, basilicas of practical kings.
But now we take leave forever by car, driving in the early morning south,
   miraculously out from under the soiled umbrella,
   south and more south in the dead blue winter light, south and west in the snow-
   light, till the snow rots in Arkansas, then west again, the holy di-
   rection.
Far from the Chicago cave, spring comes facing toward summer, such summer
   as happens only in one place in a given country.
There is a rise (where is it on the map?) on one side America and, on the
   other, California. There you look down on promised advertisements
   of green come true, green for the eating, money-green, and the rows
   of the royal palm for welcome, official, frightening. The Californians
   live in California. The money-groves are green. America is a
   suburb of California et cetera et cetera.
America is Hooghly.