American Four Square

Self-assembled, sure, though the idea at first

was carbon filament and craftsman guilds, one master

sanding the hardwood wainscot. Then the West

unfolding like tapestry toward Klondike.

On a cobblestone block, before our mothers’

mothers’ mothers breathed, a home like this

could be mail-ordered, from Sears, from a fabled

city they would never see—four new rooms

in a boxcar shuttling through the switchgrass.

No florid corbelling, no finials.

No caliginous Victorian nooks. No matter

the original flooring sagged

beneath our bookshelves. Midnights

our two-step made the mantle quake. We said yes

to the modest Prairie Box, floor plan

recalling the glacier’s carved swath. To structure

“married to the ground” as Wright proposed, new beds

stretching their savage geometry

to Kearney, Sweetwater. Sometimes

even beauty needs a border.

Only in plowless tracts along the rail cut

does the wild iris cast, still,

its explicit spell. Yes, we believed

in this mythos. We lived between Church

and University, could almost imagine no one

had died there. We hosed the spiders out.

We spent a year of savings on a mission

sofa, an expandable ladder

to reach the dormer’s moldered siding. Perma-White

paint. Shirtless, thrown brilliant

bronze, he gripped the brush between his teeth.

History, the point being, requires the most audacious

of lacquers. We wanted natural light, to be hung

in picture windows. Let the neighbors watch

our weekday reverse cowgirl (all the world’s

a stage on the corner lot). Each night

our streetlamp, too, turning on

like a new thought.