where a building has come down, a factory
or warehouse. He scythes a summer’s growth
of yarrow, culver’s root, wild aster, goldenrod—
bundling the stalks as if he had a barn full of cows
on the next block. Or the barn may be behind him
in the place he left when he set out for this city,
like the cultivators of small plots who bring their baskets
to my local market and claim in competing accents
that their peppers are the hottest, their bundled herbs
the sweetest. The house where this man was a child
is rubble now, but he’ll take home something
that smells of that place, and I have a paper bag
filled with thin green peppers that will make me cry.