There’s a yellow barn
on the side of a hill I drive by
several times a week, whizzing by it,
and it’s always just another node
in a chain of landmarks pushing me along
into the next few hours of the day.
Sometimes I nod at the barn,
checking it off the list.
Sometimes it’s not even there.

So, well, yesterday I stopped.
(It was the light of sudden spring
that made me stop, I’m fairly certain,
but, like most things, I can not be sure.)
I turned off the engine, got out,
and stood surveying the wet brown fields
as if I owned them, as if I had plans.
I leaned against the car
and tried to smell the wind like a dog,
catching fresh new scents
of the changing world,
but that didn’t work out very well,
truth be told.

So I climbed on top of the car
in that windy bright light
and told myself I was meditating now
with the trees in the nearby woods,
who were really just a bunch of old monks
waking up after an unusually wild party,
rubbing their eyes, asking each other
if someone had started coffee yet.

And I waited for the farmer
to step out of the barn’s small dark doorway
— cued by my auspicious arrival, of course —
with a shovel in his hand,
or some other useful tool,
but the guy never showed.