Vermont Barn

Vermont Barn

by Lynne Knight


The barn is so weathered it may collapse
in the next wind, and the sigh its owner
heaves then will be smaller than the wind,
an acquiescence waiting to happen, for years

now, ever since the barn listed, as the birches
around it list, drunk trees, the owner says,
laughing as he looks. A storm’s pulled
clouds into a singularity of cloud, there,

in the south, and the first rain will be loud
on the slate roof. The barn was there when
the owner bought the place, decades ago,
and near collapse then, he says, like someone

you don’t expect to live another year,
but then she does, she does, and there you are
beside her, having seen enough to know
collapse isn’t the worst way you could go.


Lynne Knight has published two full-length
collections, Dissolving Borders (1996) and
The Book of Common Betrayals (2002), and two
chapbooks, Snow Effects (2000) and Deer in
Berkeley (2003). Her work has appeared in a
number of journals, and her third collection,
Night in the Shape of a Mirror, will be
published by David Robert Books in 2006.
Effets de neige, her translation of Snow
Effects, will also appear in 2006.


from APJ v1i2, American Poetry Journal