Cruising these residential Sunday
　　streets in dry August sunlight:
　　what offends us is
　　the sanities:
　　the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
　　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
　　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
　　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,
　　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
　　
　　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
　　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
　　on a wall in the white vanishing air
　　
　　tracing the panic of suburb
　　order in a bland madness of snows