Self-hatred coils eventually upon itself-

   the warning rattle is without context, separated from the dead snake in the path

                 now gone, the rattle snapped off and slid into my pocket, inutile to the fang;

two years

              living on a road by a square copse of trees, a sloping cattle-thinned field to the

south, a tobacco barn black at the periphery of the woods,

          the poplar and basswood and native ash stripped of leaves and the pasture turned

tawny in October, the barn roseate in the afternoons, relapsing into russet in the

evening,

          swallows swung through the black square of the open loft doors;

        some days I walked a narrow dirt path and stared inside at the empty stalls and the

bales of hay;

                              the barn had earned its way into nature;

                the acre became an acre only in the moment of its purchase,

           the graders cut a road onto the lot, and the upturned red clay lining lost its

intense color as it dried,

          they leveled the inclines and put down cisterns for the creek to run under planned

parking, they tore out trees by chains,

         I looked each evening, waiting for the inevitable, I thought, this has been my

necessary net of fields and woods with the barn, or 'the view,' I thought, I want it

to be

feasible as a remnant, even if built around,

        they could be bold, they could make a statement,

      but then I knew it would be absorbed into the background, a mere gesture, a

nod beside the gleaming new,

worse, their smiling recovery, the proof of conscientious capital,

         I watched the y-wing beams of the loft rip off all together, refusing to release

their

hold,

       it was burned as a whole with the scrap of the barn in the field in April, the men

watched with their arms crossed,

       the skeleton was hauled and the remnants were burned a little more

with fire wands and whatever remained was buried in a large scrap hole.