How do you tell the story of a house? Do you go from room to room and follow the neat arrangement of objects, the photos over the piano, the cutlery, open the cupboard and let them speak? But a life remembered Does not always follow the path from the front door to the back. It probably could. But that is not my life, mine defined by occasions when I would find myself locked in or locked out. And maybe this is why A voice despairs to tell the story of a house, kicking and banging locked doors. Pieces of bent wire left in keyholes, broken windows. Sometimes the door is graciously ajar allowing a glimpse of the green and Yellow tiles, the scent of jackfruit in my grandmother’s kitchen, the clutter of accumulated, the lost possessions the need to make sense of it and make it all matter. At age eight I climbed and reached the roof of knowledge Where dominion and power await, dangerous as the branches heavy with fruit, beckoning. I inched my way to the ledge. The fruit tree fifty feet high from the ground, reached the Philippines centuries ago from Central America brought to the islands by the Spaniards. Up in the roof, I let go of my hold, reached out to pick a fruit squeezed the sweet white pulp from its purple rubbery skin. I leave the house I no longer live in. The house now foreclosed By the bank. The house I will never return to the house, knowing at one time I have tasted there sweetness, surveyed my dominion and courted my own fall, all at the same time. WILFREDO PASCUAL Less