Kitty Carpenter
I compare myself to a good barn. You can have a good barn, and if you paint it, it looks a little better. But if you take the paint off, it's still a good barn.
Dolly Parton
A Landscape
by Carl Dennis
This painting of a barn and barnyard near sundown
May be enough to suggest we don't have to turn
From the visible world to the invisible
In order to grasp the truth of things.
We don't always have to distrust appearances.
Not if we're patient. Not if we're willing
To wait for the sun to reach the angle
When whatever it touches, however retiring,
Feels invited to step forward
Into a moment that might seem to us
Familiar if we gave ourselves more often
To the task of witnessing. Now to witness
A barn and barnyard on a day of rest
When the usual veil of dust and smoke
Is lifted a moment and things appear
To resemble closely what in fact they are.
The problem with barns, in my experience, is eventually the roof costs more than the barn is worth to the person responsible for paying for a new roof. Or its too tall, too steep, too frightening to fix those missing shingles or sheet of loosened tin yourself that will eventually spell doom to the rotting timbers below, beyond the reach or means of someone who cares enough to care for them. Barns require a steady regeneration of young people, with the strength to keep it straight and upright, to nail home the new board on the siding that's just beyond the reach of your tallest ladder and still have the energy to clean out the old hay where the rats play.
Barns have their own lives, their own ecosystems, their own tender mercies. I am amazed that no one has developed a cologne that smells like horse sweat, hay, with a low note of earth and wood. If an old cowboy wanted to attract a horsey kind of lover, that smell might do the trick to attract the kind of person that could inhale fondly their stink too.
Barns and love require courage. Have you ever been on the peak of an old barn that stands over fifty feet off the ground, repairing the lightning rod, with nails in your mouth and hammer in hand, while straddling the slippery tin at its tallest point? Have you, when you finished fixing what needed fixing, with firm feet planted on either side of the pinnacle risen to your feet and know with every inch of your body that if you lose your balance you are going to wind up dead, or worse a broken back on the pile of the old rusting farrow eternally parked at the bottom of the fall line? But you do it anyways, because you know you can, because you aren't cheating death, you are embracing life and curious about the view that is just another three feet taller than where you were sitting. That's the human condition, curious what another couple of inches might unfold.
If you don't have a barn, someday, while you are still young enough and sure footed enough, climb to the top of your roof and find out what's up there. Find out what you can see on your farthest horizon. Then decide if your mind is still made up on where your future path lies.
Farm Sonnet
The barn roof sags like an ancient mare's back.
The field, overgrown, parts of it a marsh
where the pond spills over. No hay or sacks
of grain are stacked for the cold. In the harsh
winters of my youth, Mama, with an axe,
trudged tirelessly each day through deep snow,
balanced on the steep bank, swung down to crack
the ice so horses could drink. With each blow
I feared she would fall, but she never slipped.
Now Mama's bent and withered, vacant gray
eyes fixed on something I can't see. I dip
my head when she calls me Mom. What's to say?
The time we have's still too short to master
love, and then, the hollow that comes after.
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