Poetry Porch: Poetry

 

BEFORE YOU ENTER
by Catherine Breese Davis

You know how it is to hold in mind
A place—a house or a river scene—
That keeps an earlier time intact
For years, and then to go back and find
Either you had made it out to be
Something it never was, or in fact
It’s gone. Or irrelevant. Or new
High-rises dwarf it, alter the view.

So it is with me. What seemed fixed,
My version of it, has come apart.

Consider, before you enter here,
Whatever motives you have, how mixed
And yet divided these feelings are.
It’s nothing new, this being unclear—
Estranged, yet haunted.
                                       Nothing to do
But let it go at last. Or try to.


This poem is from Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master, edited by Martha Collins, Kevin Prufer, and Martin Rock, with the Unsung Masters Series, Pleaides Press, 2015.