American Life in Poetry

The subdivision – it’s all around us. Here Nancy Botkin of Indiana presents a telling picture of life in such a neighborhood: the parents downstairs in their stultifying dailiness, the children enjoying their youth under the eaves before the passing years force them to join the adults.

Geometry

All the roofs sloped at the same angle.

The distance between the houses was the same.

There were so many feet from each front door

to the curb. My father mowed the lawn

straight up and down and then diagonally.

And then he lined up beer bottles on the kitchen table.

We knew them only in summer when the air

passed through the screens. The neighbor girls

talked to us across the great divide: attic window

to attic window. We started with our names.

Our whispers wobbled along a tightrope,

and below was the rest of our lives.