The motley barn, like an old stain
gone haywire, is a dread easel.
Knots, carved into walls like old
promises, wait for quick campfires
or late hearths, warmth from Earth’s
beginning, from Laurentian spread.
 
Only darkness is inconclusive where
night points its finger. In deep aches
knots have fallen from, stars fall in, fields
of them, with the evening leader digging
deepest, digging first after yesterday’s
carcass linking still in eyes’ behavior.
 
Shadows, upstaging any moon, argue on
its lateral surfaces. I’ve seen more mandates
than dreams in dim recesses where wood
envies time, chases after it for one whole age
of transparent death; just sunken cedars in
the swamp, drowned black, live on longer,
scaled at new livelihood.
 
Against a thousand storms this barn has stood,
never folding inward, only down by degrees
of ant strokes, termite mandibles, odd carpenter;
its shoulders going sideways, knees turning softly,
its breath slow and halting, at roadside prayer.

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 Other articles by Tom Sheehan:

• Bar Harbor Passage

• Of Canadian Émigrés

• Late Night Guitar

• Front Stoop