Calculating the Damage

Milton Jordan

March 14, 2021

We drove out along the old road crumbling 

over sand hills and clumps of Johnson grass

around occasional scrub Juniper

where we bought our first house together,

a few miles west of the Pine Belt.

That place sits empty now, the back screen door

hanging loose from one rusted hinge, the windmill

fallen into the water tank, the barn 

dismantled for reusable lumber.

The foundation seems solid, but the roof 

has collapsed, and the porch no longer

connects to the house where two walls caved in.

Is anything left worth repair? you ask,

and I am unable to answer.

Milton Jordan lives in Georgetown with the musician Anne Elton Jordan. His most recent poetry collection is What the Rivers Gather, SFASU Press, 2020. Milton edited the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic, Kallisto Gaia Press, 2020.