Because I was equipped with memory,
the cane fields are still burning somewhere,
the smoke boiling gold and gray.
Before this the workers cut down the high stalks,
and then the fire, like a large animal,
was made to graze away the stubble.
How sweet everything is,
even though I am
on a humid city street, holding pencils
bought from the drugstore. On my block
there is an Irish bar, a lawnmower repair shop,
and an assisted-living facility. All this
seems insistently American, like a sky drunk

with fireworks. To my grandfather the fields
meant one kind of money, to the workers
they meant another. I was six years old
and royal, standing on the rusty hood of a Jeep.
At some point my grandfather lost
everything.
How insistent memory is,
so that even now I can still remember
the shoe store that is now a cupcake place,
the nail salon where there is now a coffee shop.
One winter killed the magnolia sapling
we planted in the yard, another killed
the hydrangea bush that was supposed to light up
with pink flowers.
When my grandfather
was old, he never said anything
about what we left behind. He loved gambling
and baseball. He died of cancer in 1996.

Sometimes we hear people roaring
out of the bar, and sometimes the screaming
from assisted-living makes the fire-trucks visit.
The things we look at keep changing:
one day's sun or another day's rain; early poppies
one day, late tomatoes another.
As though
each day was trying to say something,
with a voice that isn't coming from any throat.