| Cruising these residential Sunday |
| streets in dry August sunlight: |
| what offends us is |
| the sanities: |
| the houses in pedantic rows, the planted 5 |
| sanitary trees, assert |
| levelness of surface like a rebuke |
| to the dent in our car door. |
| No shouting here, or |
| shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt 10 |
| than the rational whine of a power mower |
| cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass. |
| |
| But though the driveways neatly |
| sidestep hysteria |
| by being even, the roofs all display 15 |
| the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky, |
| certain things: |
| the smell of spilled oil a faint |
| sickness lingering in the garages, |
| a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise, 20 |
| a plastic hose poised in a vicious |
| coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows |
| |
| give momentary access to |
| the landscape behind or under |
| the future cracks in the plaster? 25 |
| |
| when the houses, capsized, will slide |
| obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers |
| that right now nobody notices. |
| |
| That is where the City Planners |
| with the insane faces of political conspirators 30 |
| are scattered over unsurveyed |
| territories, concealed from each other, |
| each in his own private blizzard; |
| |
| guessing directions, they sketch |
| transitory lines rigid as wooden borders 35 |
| on a wall in the white vanishing air |
| |
| tracing the panic of suburb |
| order in a bland madness of snows |
