Three poems by David Middleton

Poet-in-Residence at Nicholls State University

Author

Publish Date

Sept. 23, 2015

The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems after Pictures by Jean-François Millet

David Middleton

Self-Examination: Reflections in a Mirror

Time once again for my six-months’ exam
I stand before a mirror to assess
This aging body’s state, each troubling sign
I’ll need to show my doctor — lumps or moles,
Tingling or numbness, belly fat or sores,
Heart palpitations, rashes, there with things
Beyond all cure, that sag or fall away.

But then I see what mirrored eyes now say,
Those portals of the soul where sheer light sings
Till mind will discipline while love implores
The flesh to give itself to old controls
So virtue every sin might soon confine
Till soul is more and more, the body less
And who I should have been is what I am.

September Ends: Last Crickets at the Bridge

Late summer hovers near
In early fall,
Old pre-dawn pall
Of hot damp dark and all
We know and fear.

Night sweats its star-bead stream
Down nothing’s brow,
Light’s here and now
That leaves stark depths somehow
A twinkling dream.

Yet where lamps shine through planks
Male crickets chirr,
Their wings a-whirr
Till females pine and stir,
Fertile on the banks.

Soon frost will touch their eggs
Laid warm in loam
That brings back home
Through winter gleam and gloam
Spring’s fecund dregs.

The Footbridge in a Late October Fog

Above this wordless earth’s unechoing cave
Of shades, a hunter’s moon, at bay in fire,
Stays cold and golden, relegated light
That parleys with the dark, its silent sire.

And on that earth I stalk in chalky air
Through mottled swaths of fog, freshwater salt,
Tracking the bridge, its ghostly post-lamps dim
In glimmerings where moon-rays cross and halt.

And there, half-blind, and dumb, I come to stand
Befuddled, gazing first upstream, then down
Through paling condensations, grounded clouds
Suspended from the current’s muddy brown.

These waters bear from fountainhead to gulf,
From Minnesota snows to Breton Sound
Below a moon whose quiet light declares
Fires dwelling in the stellar wells profound.

Mr. Middleton is Poet-in-Residence, Distinguished Service Professor, and Alcee Fortier Professor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. His books of verse include The Burning Fields, As Far as Light Remains, Beyond the Chandeleurs, and The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems after Pictures by Jean-François Millet.