Fable of the Barn
A green truck is passing, carrying chance
but no way to clean the windows or to
kill the stink bugs in their gray shields,
their slow march up, their endurance.
If I look away I will find some
words that don’t belong to me,
stolen, borrowed, or apprehended
as the cost of an alphabet, its
acquisition, of knowledge, of song.
Singing along, I am five again,
and happy in the sand, or unhappy
watching how the boys make things
from blocks. I would like also to be
making things but not from blocks.
Maybe from paint. When I made a
painting there wasn’t any time.
How to not have time? Paint.
Or wander away from
what you know into the strangeness,
a sure way to cancel time or
to make time fill up and not empty out
into the missing encomiums of memory.
This adventure hurts my heart, someone
said uneasily, crossing the bridge
and entering the opening in the newly
painted barn. A season was waiting there,
with sheep, and goats, and small rodents
making the dry grass move slightly
as if in a film. The barn was there, with
the books, and papers
brittle and frail in boxes, eaten
around the edges, dry as dry grass.
We need rain, another said, which will
cure you of the past. The downed leaves
look bloody on the ground, I thought,
and then wondered if the poem
is a way of thinking to oneself or
thinking to others. As if you were here
as the words come, and we both wonder if
we were ever in the barn. And the light?
The light was like a kiss as the air shifted,
so there were new shadows, and the scent
of hay, and dung, and a bright turquoise
egg hidden above the broken window’s sill;
and who were then looking
into the mouth where Aesop had spoken
to the leaping creatures, and went on his way
across the continents, carrying a stick
to move the grasses and to hit the stones
on his path, and to help him
across the muddy waters streaming
into the sea. Along the way he would sing
but we cannot know the tune, fast or slow,
melodic or off pitch, voice low or high: nothing
of the sound, even as it seems he could hear
what the turtle, what the hare, what the stork
said, what meanings they made,
from across the centuries into our unbelief.
Notes:
This piece is part of the portfolio “How It Continues to Astonish: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the March 2023 issue. All poems are from Door by Ann Lauterbach, published by Penguin, and printed here with the permission of the author.
Source: Poetry (March 2023)