Holly Anderson
Dairy Barn, Bovina, NY

A full ton of
              beetle-pocked planks,
                            dead furniture,
          forty-year old hay festooned
                            with bug frass and broken honeycomb,
a folio of gutted windows,
              heaps of small mammal bones, oil drums
                                          and
      rain-rotted beaverboard insulation torn out from
              between the joists above the milking floor with my
beloved yellow-handled pick ax—
                   loaded and stacked tight and high by hand
      right into a 15-yard dumpster was my single summer poem
                                                    and
two-day sweating, moving meditation
      in honor and service to our mansard-roofed
                           tatty red darling set hard beside the road
              and learning how to breathe once more.


Photo (detail) by Holly Anderson.
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