To cut his property taxes, the owner
bulldozed the house he’d been born in,
and the moldy chicken house and the shed
where he and his father and uncles
fixed broken machinery, and took down
the useless horse barn, piled the planks
gray upon gray, slap upon slap in the yard
and on a snowy day the following December,
sloshed it with kerosene from a bucket
weighing almost as mush as the past,
threw on a match and burned it away.

What’s left is a wire that droops in
from the county road to a power pole,
the meter like a dirty drop of rain,
and three concrete steps that lead up
to the porch that’s gone, with an iron rail
like a warm leather strap you can grip
if you’ve gotten wobbly, and if you climb
those steps and peer through the door
that used to be there you may be able
to hear what sounds like people talking
out of sight in a room at the back,
and see at the other end of the hall
the flare of a lightly curtained window
thrown open to what used to be.