She would stand in the corner
of the barn and whisper
love notes to cobwebs,
hoping someone in the fields
heard a vibrato on the wind.

Untouched, the Chevy Loadmaster
with the rotted driver’s seat
still smells like an oil can
left in reach to keep the baler
spinning those late August nights.

Once these concrete stalls
held Holsteins’ helpless lowing
as barn wasps cleaned
the liquid from their eyes
between shallow-diving swallows.

Always work left undone,
as night closed down the household,
a porch still asking for repair,
the south hill field never cleared
of rocks and tree stumps.

There, hidden behind mud daubers’ nests,
the note she carved in hayloft rafters
before she left, another unheard
whisper for the fields, seeds planted
that refused to grow.