The
Barn Girl
The barn girl was from a northern land
of blueberries and apples heavy on the branch.
Mostly she never looked at barns, old red,
gray red, weathered and often dead.
Black hole barns where roofs once sheltered
the damp and earthy aroma of a different time.
The barn girl was a northern girl,
a mother’s girl who came to live in a barn,
a sad old creaky barn where the stars are seen
through slats that welcomed snow or rain
as her mother cooked peas, sometimes rice,
maybe fried Spam from the church in the valley,
cooked on a hot plate, two pans in their truck,
an orange extension cord running long off
to an outdoor receptacle on the crippled farm
wife’s house.
How many years can a barn girl look at the stars
and still think star and all the colors and dreams
that a girl was once promised about stars,
looking at stars and counting them and charting them
in the calendar of her mind? Count them
because nothing is hopeless in the land of blueberries
and apples
even when the clothes to fit or the blanket on the cot
comes to the barn in a box at Christmas delivered
by kids in a town, kids from a school she can’t know.
And in the black cold night the barn girl painted
a portrait layered and brushed and troweled over
and over again. There is a barn red like an October
star.
There in the sky right at midday is the sun
so hot the eyes want to sweat, instead of orchards of
blueberries and apples there is a grove of orange
trees,
oranges bright like a child loved them with a crayon,
the child just a girl, a girl there in that portrait,
the orange in her hand pressed hard between the nose
and lips.
