my only advance warning before I saw the noise
was grass standing from a clean ditch
which didn't help me much, the grass was already overtaken
by overpass construction, and by my shadow
and the shadows of the cars adjacent to me
I had no chance of remembering the restaurants of Shackleford,
the carwash at the top of the hill, the hotel
where my family was stranded for months after the housefire
remembering a family long-indebted like a caption,
like a term on a lease, living off insurance money
remembering the constant delivery food, cable television
for once, the swimming pool of every day, the day my parents
sat my brother and I down to talk about divorce,
the range of the season, the drip of the nice,
wealthy, clean, Western side of town, the drip of a nucleus
that might have never existed but that certainly ruptured
but I can't tell you too much about it from the asphalt,
the gray concrete along the interchange melting under
me, stopped cars among stopped cars, watching and
listening to the massive crane engulfed in fire and now
even the smell -- I found the fire again
April, 2014