The second task was even harder: “Now the place,”
she told us, “that was home to you before.”
I couldn’t draw the first place well, but at least
I knew what place it was. Where was I last at home?

Perhaps the room below my eldest son, the space carved out
from mounds of my estranged wife’s goods, her furniture
and clothes, spare comforters and curtains, boxes
full of papers from her jobs, and some discarded things
that had been mine and thus were not worth caring for.
I was glad to have it—my own air to breathe nor ask
permission—but beyond the air and finally the space
I tidied, cozied, squeezed a life into, it wasn’t mine
but hers as landlord and my son’s as paying tenant,
both of them with rules. So, home?
The nearest thing I had to one, but no.

I sketched instead the house of my six years with her,
the side of it that I preferred, the outside.
That was mine, the lawn I mowed, the trees I planted,
and the garden—that is what I should have drawn,
my wealth of Bloomsdale, Buttercrunch, Blue Lake,
and oh-my Mortgage Lifters, Brandywines and Jubilees.
Until she called me in, I liked to call myself
a farming man—out standing in my field—until
the fungus took the mustard, foiled my plots
of cukes and squash, and endless summer rains
drowned all my purple Cherokees, until my spade
brought little from the once-rich earth but plantain,
poetry and vetch. My name’s still on the title deed
(and on the deed that nearly did me in), a mortgage
never to be lifted till the year of Jubilee,
to be my once and future harvest home.

My now home, as you see, is crudely drawn.
I’ve long forgotten everything I knew about perspective.
Can you make them out, my desk, my lamp, my chair?
They were all my father’s, in the place he used to sit
while working on his book on zeolites—a field
in which he really did stand out—and then
his homely tales of childhood on the farm.
Before he died, he wanted me to have them. Here
they are, and where they are, I am at home.