Porches

The Village of Saline, Bienville Parish, North Louisiana
At My Late Maternal Grandparents’ House

The sand and gravel road, smooth asphalt now,
Passes beside the church and sunken stones
Of kin both dead and living yet awhile
In memories of one who left and stayed.

I slow down for those fields recalled and seen—
The cultivated, fallow, undisturbed—
Shift my old standard into neutral gear,
Then quietly glide toward stillness and the drive.

Others have owned this house for sixty years,
And though my home is here in every sense,
Possessing and possessed I cannot step
At will upon a transferred property.

So rolling down the window I look out
Binding in mind what’s gone with what remains,
Then walk up to a gatepost where I wait
For shades to gather thin in autumn air.

And there, in seasons blending without end—
The bloom and fruit, oxalis and pecan—
On that deep porch between the hall and yard
I see myself and listen, man and child,

To voices long conversant with a world
Made up of things that have their place and ways
In calendar and catalogue and rhyme,
The holy days of ordinary time:

Spring’s golden corydalis, white-topped sedge,
The yellow evening primrose, yellow worts—
St. Peter’s and St. John’s—in summer dusk,
Wisteria in thickets by the streams,

The sprawling moss verbena—purple, rose—
By early August done, October’s frost-
And chain-leaf asters, winter possum haw,
And dandelion puffballs at winter’s end.

And where these thrive and die without a sound
Pine warblers nest unseen in tallest pines,
Their high-pitched trill forever coming down
While from the last few open longleaf groves

Now passing with the passing hillside farms
Lark-sparrows sing in elegy and leave
Stump fields of their unsettled breeding-place,
Searching in other woods for native ground.

Such things I take to heart and keep in mind,
Beholding and beholden, in their gift,
Each one a porch—a station and a way,
The inward and the outward reconciled,

The fathomed patterns matching, world and word,
Like mockingbirds whose mimicking in spring
Sweetens into a single autumn song,
By Choctaws called “the bird of many tongues.”

And so I leave the gatepost and the drive
In treetop light from afternoon’s low sun
That blinds me in the rear-view mirror’s glass,
The future now reflected in the past

Along this sand hill road where crest to crest
Pines rise sky-high in colonnades of fire.

David Middleton

David Middleton is Professor Emeritus of English and Poet in Residence Emeritus at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. Middleton’s books of verse include The Burning Fields (LSU Press, 1991), As Far As Light Remains (The Cummington Press [Harry Duncan], 1993), Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press, 1999), The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet (LSU Press, 2005), The Fiddler of Driskill Hill (LSU Press 2013), and Outside the Gates of Eden (Measure Press, 2023). In the spring of 2025, Texas Review Press will publish "Time Will Tell: Collected Poems/ David Middleton." “Pickets” first appeared in the September 2023 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. “Porches” and Section iv of The Dwelling Place first appeared in the Alabama Literary Review. All three poems have been lightly edited for this posting and will be included in "Time Will Tell."