Road Rising Into Deep Grass (Gretchen Steele Pratt)

All I know about barns I know
From the highway. They apple
The horizon with their fragrant
Rotting. Yesterday, I was in love
So the barns disheveled themselves

With frost and fat animals sleeping
In the sun. And somewhere, in back
Of the decades, my mother strings up
Tobacco leaves to dry in a barn north
Of Hartford. It was always August

And she worked under silky white nets.
All I know about barns I know from
The highway and I mean barns, not
Greenhouses, heaven’s music boxes
Covered in snow and glowing—just

The memory of red barns, of this wooden
World, soft-soaking in the long wet grass.
Somewhere behind the last century thunder
Washes over Glastonbury and my mother
Swings down silent from Aunt Pauline’s

Hayloft, lands in a pile of hay and stays there,
Listening to it tick beneath her. At night,
The barns were swinging, slamming
Giants full of wind and pitchforks beside
Her tight new farmhouse. All I know

From the highway is that barns collapse
Plank by plank into the sky. I don’t
Even know why they were always red.
Often I imagine them slowly moving
Toward each other, like islands.