The uncoursed sun, a vulnerable
evening’s chords
of fallow field,
the mounded rows you think at first are graves,
which we traverse to reach
the 1000-year-old
fortified grange.
Somehow it missed the war though everything
near the railroad’s
gone to bits.
Nothing in this place to fix or modernize.
No one to claim it. Someone’s vision
was to fill
the vaulting barn
once a year with music around now.
Silence opens wooden gates
made from the primeval forest
cleared to farm. The pock-marked limestone walls
enclose a cluttered courtyard
in the middle of which
humans mill, perusing
cd’s, having drinks among the cattle stalls.
Inside is Bach,
and tonight an owl
whose contrapuntal hoots
you hear before you see him
land high in the rafters just
like your dream of flying.
At midnight, sun dipped down at last,
the full moon
floodlights the watch tower.
The gates closing, we’re cast out
to the carless field, nor other farmstead near
to dim the sense of
not belonging here.
Originally published in Crazyhorse. Copyright © 2016 by Cynthia Hogue. Used with the permission of the poet.