David Middleton
David 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 (LSU Press, 1991), As Far as Light Remains (The Cummington Press, 1993), Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press, 1999), and The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet, (LSU Press, 2005). Middleton has also published several chapbooks of verse, the latest of which is The Language of the Heart, (Louisiana Literature Press, 2003). Middleton's verse has appeared in The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, Louisiana Literature, Xavier Review, Critical Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, The Lyric, and elsewhere. Middleton has served as poetry editor of The Anglican Theological Review and currently serves as poetry editor for The Classical Outlook and the national quarterly Modern Age. In 2006 Middleton received The Governor’s Award for Professional Artist of the Year.
Reprinted from jubileewritersconference.org
Morning Toilette
ca. 1860-62
Through diamond panes webbed tight in crosshatched lead
Pale strands of morning’s pliant light are strained,
Falling so soft on cheeks that none can see,
Obstructed by an upper arm and hand—
A harvest-girl just risen from her bed.
The rumpled single sheets, a pillow pressed,
Are wet with unkissed tears. The filtered beams
Reveal a pitcher, crumpled cloth, wood comb
Distilled upon the sill in gold and blue.
This is a private moment unconfined
By role or sex, unvexed and intimate,
The hidden inwardness that all possess.
And yet since there’s no husband and no child
To call her wife and mother she must work
Into a knotted bun those gathered strands
That none caress, locks strained against the grain.
Reprinted by permission of LSU Press from
The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet by David Middleton. Copyright David Middleton 2006.
View Morning Toilette (Black conté crayon and pastel on cream laid paper) by Jean-François Millet at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
“If I Should Die Before I Wake”:
of a Daughter Who Died at the Age of Ten
For David Mills
So many nights I sat beside your bed
Tucking you in and brushing back your hair
When “Now I lay me down” and books we read
Could bring the sleep of fairy tale and prayer.
And though you seemed untroubled I would say
Before your droopy eyelids closed for good
That if some fear had built up from the day
To tell me and I’d quell it if I could.
And once when winter’s early darkness fell
On Dolly’s twisted leg and rolled-back eye
Awry from tightest hugs old frights compel
You asked me “Daddy, am I going to die?”
Then pressing both your hands in one warm palm
As I had done the morning of your birth
I told the truth in terms that left you calm
With dreams of many years on mother earth.
Yet now in this dread antiseptic place
By monitors that measure my despair
Too soon I stroke these teardrops from your face
And brush a head strong medicines make bare.
Meanwhile in flesh I know so chastely well
My drawn blood and your own flow vein by vein
In wars between each pale and crimson cell,
Our long defeat’s slow holocaust of pain.
And from such pain in frightened eyes that scan
The face of one whose strength was ever there
To soothe you when some fevered dream began
I see a fear grown far too deep to share:
A fear that stays awake in aching sleep
Brought on by drugs too weak for this disease
Which will persist through any watch I keep
And love’s great rage no grace can yet appease.
And when the night, departing with your breath
A floor below the floor where you were born
Leaves me those things that I must leave to death
I’ll hold them till the soul’s last threads are torn.
Reprinted by permission of Louisiana Literature Press from The Language of the Heart by David Middleton. Copyright David Middleton 2003.