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My heart is pressed 2x4s

                  Did you not marry me for love? (Of course…)

Sandpapered rough on its edge

And in its right angles;

I smell the burnt etching of your engraving, hot

On my fine grain.

Mary stood at the Bridgestone Barn, its

Ancient ballasts at ground level, supporting heavy, knotted

Arches with an unfilled space between. Did I say

Pressed? Not pressed, but hidden,

an obvious gift.

Words like “cool” or “whatever” don’t apply

Here; unserious words for our serious work.

Some say love is a first-sight; but yours happened

Last (sight), an after thought…

How do you understand a love, an

abstract that we try to mold and frame;

A bold tangent crooked in its space, intersecting

where it shouldn’t.  Rough edges unplaned.

*******

He set the Bridgestone Barn ablaze at its moorings,

the old pine in resin shadows, the limestone laughing.

Jacob hoisted the ladder to the famed loft and climbed, and he

Sat waiting for burnt dust of the hay, the scent

Knowing its direction, up and through and over.

Will you burn like the stone and timber and the ash? Will you burn

                  like I burn, a far and a deep smoldering?

You will watch a black plume rise; you will taste its toxic flesh

From a mile away or two or never.

The barn, a laughing phantom, a pantomime of time.  

It screams out in its own derisive misery,

To at last laugh at our own failed history.