In watercolors, I might have painted it “negatively,”
letting the barn emerge from the cobalt sky,
like a venerable house in a historic landscape.
From my upstairs-bedroom window, I used to ponder
its sagging timber shoulders and open gable roof,
the weeds all round it metamorphosed by moonlight.
I hope beyond hoping that we live beyond this life,
but when a red tractor, with a maw-like mechanical grapple,
knocked the barn down, leaving only dust, detritus, and silence,
I mourned the emptiness. Then waxwings, bees, hornets, cicadas,
bats, swallows, and all the rest of them arrived in the gold daylight
falling upon mushrooms, blueberries, lichens, and ferns.
The air smelled of honey. This emptiness was not nothing,
but the opposite of fullness, and my grief was gone.