the barn

the barn stood before the children,
a monumental artifact, a slant tower;
i learned years ago that these are the best places for
those inclined toward reaching the moon

and it was not long before they had discovered
a point of entry where they might crawl beneath it,
small enough to walk on their haunches
being half the height they'll be in 10 years

my little miners shuffling with their
heads bowed, ducking to avoid a certain
calamity of cobwebs and the prospect of the pointy ends
of nails that missed the flesh of the board above

who knows what triggers the desire to range
out into an unknown world looking for whatever
may be found? a child is searching for nothing more
than to be able to say they'd seen something for the first time

but, isn't that what all those explorers said who came before?
to set sail, to hack through a hot jungle, to duck into a cave?
praying to spy that thin green line on the horizon, to stumble upon
gold statues to native gods, to let the eyes fall on primitive drawings?

when i was half my height i was always striking out
into an ominous wood cut by a crawling brook; or climbing into
the cadavers of fallen trees; or investigating the blanched barns i found
along the back roads on high summer days

this was the calling of a generation of children whose existence coiled
around the bones of nature, where we fed our imaginations on the
flesh from the rural nutriments that surrounded us: country roads, country
brooks, country promenades of green and country barns

our urban cousins had their own feasts, i'm sure of it, their
fantasies fueled no less than ours, but by the gray steel and red brick
of their landscapes rather than the drafty barns into which
we here in the country found ourselves rummaging

my children, banking deeper into the darkness of the bowels
of our barn minded a stem of light shooting down through a
board and they surged toward it, using it to advance the narrative
they had been stitching; the light was a sign, they said, a signal

once there, my daughter in the lead, they came upon the remains of a cat
that had come to rest in that brown dirt, supine now it its death, staring off
the vision of the corpse made the three recoil but kept them as
well, death just another token that profits the imagination of children

i too found dead things in the paths of my explorations
once having walked out into the woods behind our home
to dodge familiar poplars and sink my feet into moss, aimless and
without any agenda beyond wanting to be immersed into something

i came to a ridge that collapsed into a hollow and there, in the
lowest part, was the body of a deer, laid to rest on a wide bed of leaves
i was stopped quick by it, dropped into a crouch, knowing that
had it been alive it would have darted off already, so it became a token

and on my journey back home, i wove into my ever-growing story
the body of the deer and the way it smelled sweet but evil; how its eyes
were staring at the woods; how its legs seemed to be choreographed into
an eternal leap; how the protrusion of the tip of its tongue was the oddest part of all

and likewise to my children with their dead cat beneath those ancient boards
everything becomes a part of a personal fiction, an evolving arc, a way in which to use
what one has seen and felt as a chance to advance the imagination in order to drown out the mendacity of real life, because they know in their bones that real life is a worse fiction

they emerged with their tale - part truth (i saw the cat later for myself) and mostly
pretend - about how the darkness beneath the barn held in it things only they could
possibly appreciate; like the treasure buried, the mysterious beings in the shadows,
the flight from danger, the epic victory at the last second

and all of it so real

so real