Casas naufragadas, perdidas

—Heberto Padilla

When I was a child in Queens with Grandfather’s

tulips and Grandmother’s peach trees, my attic

room sloped to windows above the grape arbor

and August nights were thick with humid heat,

long before wreckers splintered everything

for the red-bricked stories of apartments.

The Florida home from which I finished

high school still stands, but my family moved,

left the house occupied by strangers, made

foreign by their unfamiliar furnishings,

and the hickory woods I walked at sunset

beyond the yard were bulldozed for tract housing.

Even here in Denver, home of my recent

history, I show you a new parking lot

where I wrote that romantic poem you like

living in a house which no longer exists,

its rooms as finally lost as the moments

of putting pen to paper in their silence.

Those houses lost, I must, like a Druid

remember without corporal assistance:

the house in Queens had a glassed-in front porch;

in the morning light slanting through its panes

I traced the bright outlines of autumn leaves,

taking the look of oak and maple to heart.