Margaret Atwood - The City Planners lyrics
[Margaret Atwood - The City Planners lyrics]
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
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