is this a rhetorical question?

Professor what’s-her-name asks us where is 

home for you and half the class 

elevates eager answer-hands, me and

the rest tentative looking to linoleum tiles,

chests groaning like stepped-on 

weathered wood. What’s-his-name pipes home is 

where the heart is but

where is the heart?

Still lying spread-eagle beneath the side-yard pear tree,

cradled by suspended showers of 

butter-white springtime blossoms,

a crescendo whisper of the coming storm. 

It stood until it didn’t, it

fluorescent whip flash-splintered clean in half

while the sky cried for it.

In the aftermath, rotting pear 

petals and crocodile tears and stillness. 

The landscape changed after the landscapers came to

fetch the burnt-toast remnants of my sister’s favorite tree.

The landscape always changes and so 

do the ingredients for comfort.

In a different-but-the-same classroom a

new inquisitor with the same loaded question,

where is the heart?

Still a visitor in its own cavity, in this familiar

house with the front door painted blood red. 

It beats confused two-thousand miles away,

aglow under burnt-toast Southern California street bulbs

in the company of a well-lived couch,

chiseled cigarette butts, a

red door one-shade-lighter. 

The heart asks loud,

have I come home yet?