The moon alert in the sky,
tomorrow like an arm
waving, I love to go out
late in the evening, stand beside
the huge barn, rickety
over its rusty machinery.
Familiar as loaves of bread,
white wooden houses rise
and fall under the moonlight,
breathing the same air I breathe
and that the cows breathe as they sleep
or drift with a heaviness drawn
from deep hollows beneath them,
their movements easy,
the way we remind ourselves to move—
slow and mothering through the dark.
—Patricia Zontelli, Menomonie
