Jimmy Santiago Baca (2 January 1952 / Santa Fe, New Mexico)

We bought a small house
along the river, in Southside barrio.
A shack I pried boards from the front door to get in-
half-acre of land in the back
heaped with decades of scrap-rusted wire fencing, creosote
railroad ties, tumbleweeds, a mountain of decaying
harvest never picked, weaving itself
slowly into the dirt again.

I gutted the plaster frame house,
nailed, puttied, roofed, plumbed,
poured cement, sheet-rocked, tiled, carpeted,
tore-out, re-set,
piled, burned, cleaned, cemented, installed,
washed and painted,
trimmed, pruned, shoveled, raked,
sawed, hammered, measured, stuccoed,
until,
calloused handed, muscle-firmed, sleek hard bodied,
our small house rose
from a charred, faded gravemarker,
a weather-rotted roost
for junkies and vagrants,

wind, rain, and sun splintered
jagged stories of storms on,
I corrected,
re-wrote upon
this plaster wood tablet,
our own version of love, family and power.