Like her own face, she thinks, all
that barn needs is a good paint job.
Weather-worn. She knows how
that feels. We've both done our share
in ninety years, she tells it out loud.

How many winters did she trudge
out to milk those dumb beasts
to quiet their lowing, hear the hiss
of steam rising in ice-coated buckets,
see gratitude in their wet eyes?

The paint she called ocean blue –
now faded to weary sky – how proud
she'd been to tell her friends, Turn right
off of 34 where you see the barn roof
shimmering like a lake in the cornfield.

It's been twenty years since Elmer
drove his tractor back 'round the curve
toward the shed, forty since any horses
clopped there, near eighty since she
and her sisters rode the buggy to church

singing She's only a bird in a gilded cage.
She looks out one last time to the barn,
drinks it in deep before her daughter
wheels her away to suffocate in some
small room twenty-five miles away.