December 2017
David Huddle
dhuddle@uvm.edu
dhuddle@uvm.edu
“Mrs. Green” appeared in my first poetry collection, Paper Boy, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1979. This photograph was taken by my wife in 1978, when our daughter Bess was five years old. I wrote most of the poems in Paper Boy in a span of about three months, in the house behind us here, in Essex Center, Vermont. Actually my study was the room from which these windows look out onto our back yard. I’d been writing poems seriously for about ten years and occasionally publishing one or two, but the Paper Boy poems were a breakthrough for me. I found a voice that opened up material I’d never even thought of using--the year and a half that I delivered the Roanoke Times to 80 houses in Ivanhoe, Virginia. Writing poems about my introduction to the world beyond my family and my school was deeply thrilling to me, maybe because witnessing my daughter’s growing up gave me a kind of double vision. I wrote as both a child and a grown-up.
Mrs. Green
At the screen door
a pretty woman just
married and in shorts
on a Saturday in May,
she was sweet to me
when I came up to collect,
offered me something cold
to drink,
which I refused
for the sake of dreaming
the whole summer I was
twelve about what it
would be like some
morning to walk
softly into
that lady’s
kitchen.
At the screen door
a pretty woman just
married and in shorts
on a Saturday in May,
she was sweet to me
when I came up to collect,
offered me something cold
to drink,
which I refused
for the sake of dreaming
the whole summer I was
twelve about what it
would be like some
morning to walk
softly into
that lady’s
kitchen.
© 2017 David Huddle
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