I miss the smell of pungent weeds 
on a summer’s afternoon. Old Groff Town Road 
must still be here, smothered under this new street—
it’s precise grade crisply edged with a concrete ledge.
I step onto a parking lot
I perspire my way across
with its angled white lines stretching flatly
to the auto parts store
I will not actually enter. I grow small
in the expanse of this alien asphalt
where I once played—here on the edge
of town. Groff Town Road flowed like a river
along the contours of the land
as if poured from buckets by cheerful men
some golden September. The girl I used to be
fed apple cores to piebald horses 
in the weathered gray stable, she begged
broken bits from the family-owned
pretzel factory on the corner. She explored, barefoot,
the shallow dump—climbing into an abandoned
clawfoot bathtub to sunbathe in a sundress
tied at the shoulders, her curly hair untamed, uncombed 
all summer as she laid claim to this border land,
sometimes with Simon, her straight-haired
best friend with an English accent, 
before he unraveled. They once sat 
slumped against the stable on a hot afternoon,
yellow and white cabbage butterflies
punctuating their darting thoughts as they shared
a Coke from a glass bottle—their spit mingling
with the sweat of the shapely bottle—I guess
the Coke machine installed in that half-wild 
place was harbinger of this store and new road—
progress proclaimed in concrete,
the way sugar and cold fizz
could make you think your thirst was quenched.