Cow stalls and piles of old magazines—
the barn was becoming a ghost with
sun streaming eyes of old windows.

It had been a church,
but 300 years
had whispered by.

My grandmother sat in a lawn chair in her usual black
dress with a tiny white handkerchief bordered with lace
tucked under her belt.

She wanted to watch the show
when the movers came.

Wisps of dreams, of the old meadows
that had fed that barn, those cows.
Maybe we realized we could die too.
But back then the barn still breathed
slow, steady, through its magical
contracting and expanding roof.

The only place of refuge left for my father,
a postcard, a backdrop seen
from the kitchen windows..

When the truck from the Fogg Museum
lumbered up our narrow driveway
to carry the crates away, the men jumped out.
The monstrous crates held archeological plunder,
tiles from an old bath of Tethys, the mother
of sweet waters, all the rivers.

My mother served the workmen sandwiches and lemonade,
took a picture of one of them napping afterwards
out in the scrubby part of the lawn near my grandmother
who was drinking lemonade,
holding a cigarette,
ash dripping down her black dress.

Tethys, crated, flew off,
her magic wings sprouting from her forehead,
her eyebrows thick and lush.

I wish I’d known she’d been there, even all in pieces.
I’d have stolen something of her, a tile of eyebrow,
an edge of wing, a tiny fish.
Tethys, daughter of Uranus and Gaia,
Her long dark hair flowing down.

That was when the gray-shingled barn
up on hill behind our house
began to breathe its last.

Decades passed and it was
condemned:
one more useless
dangerous old thing.