You rinse with bleach,  you smell like smoke,  eat beans  from a
can  and  pray  for sleep, measuring time by clouds that skim the
pond. You drink beer with strangers, play the rusticator's game,
learn the names of weeds  and  forget  the hot granite of summer
stoops.  You chew on grass,  trim the wick when a spark strikes
home.

There:  your grandparents' rented  rooms,  the weekly  bath,  the
dessert  of  saltines and  jam.  You dream of Route 66  and   die
the tourist's death,  forage for cellar holes  weeping for mint  and
rambling   roses,   for  tattered  curtains   and  tilting  barns   and
depleted stock,  your history elsewhere, an orchard tangled with
suckers.

You abandon what was yours for what was briefly settled, tread
on  their  plots  and  see  how  you  came,  when  he  died,   into
nothing.