Red Barn

On a day when the sky is padded with clouds,

she rides in the backseat behind her mother and father,

looks out the window and sees the first red barn.

Nestled in a swirl of hill, it reels in her imagination

like a rainbow fish. She hears the soft whinny of

a pony named Nickel, feels the wiggling velvet of

a basket of kittens squirming beneath her hand.

Finally, the cottage at the end of a one-lane road.

She stretches a beach towel over the warm planks

of the pier, digs with pleasure into a brown grocery bag

stuffed with library books, leaves for Rhett Butler,

easily conjured in the smoky puddles that hang in the air

from her father’s cigar. Mother calls to lunch; she returns.

For a while, she watches the raft bob and wink an invitation,

but she declines, preferring Merlyn and Wart and dreaming

her future in the sighing trees and lapping waves.

As the week ends, she turns away slowly,

climbs back into the city girl’s frame.

Inside a red barn, a pony named Nickel

whinnies goodbye.

 

Poem written as an ekphrastic response to the original painting

Red Barn  by artist Anne Raskopf