Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Rear Porches of an Apartment Building” reads like a staggered urban still life: a servant-girl on the lower porch, two women above her, then three children and a nurse above them. The building’s hidden rear face becomes a vertical arrangement of lives, each tier coloured and animated differently.
At the poem’s core is an unequal relationship to vitality and time. The servant-girl addressed in the opening is defined through a strange negative sky—one that has never known sun, moon, or stars and resembles “a dead, kind face.” Her eyes, the speaker says, would give that sky its colour. Yet she is “singing of pear-trees in the sun,” scraping “the yellow fruit you once picked / When your lavender-white eyes were alive.” The present tense of singing and scraping collides with the past of picking and seeing. Her labour has outlasted the life that once lay behind it, so the song becomes a way of holding onto a rural past full of sun, pears, and sight.
Above her, the poem shifts to two women with faces “the color of dry brown earth” who “knit grey rosettes and nibble cakes.” Earth here is dry rather than generative, and their activity is small, decorative, even trivial. The children above them are odder still: “Gravely kissing each other’s foreheads,” they behave less like playing children than like miniature adults performing a solemn ritual. Even the nurse’s “huge red fan” is a burst of colour, but it only stirs the air; nothing appears to grow or change.
The final couplet introduces the word “death” almost casually. For the figures on the upper porches, the disappearance of the afternoon is not a loss; it is “but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.” They feel the day’s end as a change in light and geometry, not as an ending. The servant-girl’s position is different. The sky that would match her eyes has already lost sun, moon, and stars, and her song names the pear-trees’ sunlight precisely because her eyes no longer have it. She is closer to knowing disappearance; those above her see only shadow.
Formally, the poem works through free verse rather than rhyme or regular metre. Its music comes from repetition and parallelism: the double opening “A sky that...” and the twice-repeated “On the porch above...” build the poem floor by floor, as if imitating the architecture it describes. The long, observational lines slow into pauses, especially the hanging ellipsis after “a huge red fan....,” which leaves the scene suspended. Colour carries much of the argument: “yellow fruit,” “lavender-white eyes,” “dry brown earth,” “grey rosettes,” “huge red fan,” and “blue-black shadows” are carefully graded. Vivid yellow and red belong to memory or to one startling object; browns, greys, and blue-blacks spread upward and outward as the afternoon dies.
The poem’s significance lies in its refusal to moralise. It does not call the women cruel or the servant-girl noble. Instead, it arranges them in three still tiers and lets details accumulate. A rear porch—usually an overlooked, private back space—becomes a place where class, work, memory, and mortality sit side by side and floor by floor. In fourteen lines, the building’s stacked back porches turn into a small map of who still carries the sun, and who can afford to see the day’s death as mere shadow.