My house is missing,
the safe, in-between house, after infancy and before high school.
It was brick, painted white, two-story with a greenhouse
by its side. Brick-pathed gardens my parents built lay in the rear,
a log cabin playhouse sat in snowball bushes nearby.
Its four acres seemed unending to a child of six romping
with Great Danes. I hid and played, gathered fruit
in the North Forty, my father’s name for the apple orchard.
Asparagus grew in beds Dad had dug while I watched.
A tire swing hung from a hundred-year-old white oak.
My house is missing.
The greenhouse with its snapdragons and scented air is gone.
Old trees are fresh-cut stumps. Everything is off-kilter
like the shattered lights atop the old gate pillars.
The stone bridge across the creek leads nowhere.
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