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 Leaving Drexel Street A Wife’s Goodbye August 1990, 942 Drexel Street, Southern Heights, Shreveport, Louisiana for my mother, Anna Sudduth Middleton The sun is going down on our last day As on the first in this the only house That we, as man and wife, have ever owned: Stacked boxes packed and numbered once again, The wedding service worn with use and love— Cracked china, tarnished silver—wrapped in sheets Of Shreveport Times whose syndicated reams Say nothing of this home I kept and made and dreamed. Outside, the front yard’s red-brick flowerbed Still blooms with portulaca planted there When these splotched hands were rosy as the heads That bow and close in latest summer dusk While I, as my sick husband, sitting, waits For movers to remove us from our world, Must walk one final time these rooms I share With ghosts that speak and breathe in memory’s breathless air: The parlor where we met in formal dress The pastor, salesman, candidate, new friend; The dining room where fasting met repast, Those bowls and greens our kiln and garden gave; The kitchen whose bright rites of knife and fire Prepared the table’s meat, fish, leaf, and root; The bathroom where we washed, then drained away The soil and oil and dust—refuse of all our days; The bedroom where we lay to gaze and love, At deepest peace with seasons of the stars, Where, when our son was born, we snuggled up To read him lore of Mother Goose and Grimm, Of Greece and England, Rome and Bethlehem— Fathering wonders hidden in the words That call all children home from the absurd, Great stable tales that lift the bidden heart and mind.  But now the movers come: the dark van waits To haul off all these recollected things In one blank clanging chamber to our boy With whom we now will live in love’s last rooms Near far Acadian marshes well below This river bluff’s crimped hills, these Southern Heights We’ll leave when one more watering is done, A parting bride’s moss roses still touched by setting suns. ...

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