Empyrean

by Dave Mehler

After we drive out to Pete French’s round barn your choir started

singing without you. I could never have imagined how

beautiful a barn could be; round, cedar-shingled, designed

to train horses, hundreds, to pull wagons year-round unhindered

by blowing snow. In the center a post, a barkless ponderosa tree

holds up the strutted structure like a majestic wooden umbrella

handle; inside a circular stone wall, windowed, separates

an outer run from an inner dirt-floored sanctum with such

amazing acoustics.

A short-eared owl has chosen to nest

under the shallow peak using the struts, its fledges hiding in those ribs,

its generations going on for over a century, but just now they listen

their unseen heads bob to acapella as the kids extempore sing

a spiritual in the round, This may be the last time,

this may be the last time, children,

This may be the last time may be the last time I don’t know…

One of the last standing wonders of its kind. All this too

much—I must step outside and be consoled by a lone meadowlark

calling

to startled ducks who flap their applause.

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Dave Mehler lives in McMinnville, Oregon. His chapbook, God Truck Nature, appeared in the chapbook anthology, Burning Gorgeous: Seven 21st Century Poets, edited by Pamela O’Shaughnessy (Robertson Publishing, 2010). He served as an administrator at the popular online global forum/workshop, The Critical Poet. More recently, he served on the board of the Oregon Poetry Association. His full-length poetry collections are Roadworthy (Aubade Publishing, 2020) and Bad Is Bent Good (Aubade Publishing, 2025). He is currently shopping a manuscript of love poems, Cloud Street, and is working on another, The Afterward. He works as a driver at a landfill near Portland.