"Island Cities" by John Updike

You see them from airplanes, nameless green islands 

in the oceanic, rectilinear plains, 

twenty or thirty blocks, compact, but with 

everything needed visibly in place—

the high-school playing fields, the swatch of park 

along the crooked river, the feeder highways,

the main drag like a zipper, outlying malls 

sliced from dirt-colored cakes of plowed farmland.

Small lives, we think—pat, flat—in such tight grids. 

But, much like brains with every crease CAT-scanned, 

these cities keep their secrets: vagaries 

of the spirit, groundwater that floods 

the nearby quarries and turns them skyey blue, 

dewdrops of longing, jewels, boxed in these blocks.

"Island Cities" by John Updike, from Americana: And Other Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.