When You Were There
Suzanne Morris
September 21, 2022
–for Connie
I’ve been thinking of you lately,
and wanted to be in touch–
Not long ago I went back to Idylwood
and took a stroll.
It hasn’t changed much
over the years from
the way I remembered it.
Those sturdy brick homes
retreating behind leafy shade trees
on streets sloping down to where
the bayou winds unhurriedly
along its path
still evoked a dreamy, faraway
feeling that made it hard to believe
I was only a few minutes from
downtown Houston.
I started at our house,
across the street from the park
where as a child I would
fly through the air
on a wood plank swing
suspended on bulky iron chains
and plunge, terrified, from the
top of the mountainous sliding board.
Then I found myself
pivoting around and
heading one street over
to the house where you and
your mother lived for a year or so.
I didn’t recall the house number
but I remembered
your attic bedroom with
two dormer windows
overlooking the front walk, and
that’s how I found it.
First thing I thought of was
that time we stayed up all night
stretched out on the bed
in our shorty pajamas
cramming for finals
on No-Doz!
And after a while you
looked up from your books
and said to me, with an intensity
I wouldn’t forget,
that you loved it there and wanted
never to leave....
It was nice to see the family
who live there now
are doing their part to
keep up the neighborhood–
there are flowers blooming
up and down the front walk.
As I paused in my steps
my gaze swept up to
those two windows,
and I found myself imagining you,
up there in your attic room,
peering down at the sun-speckled
houses and yards below.
All at once a queer feeling
overtook me, that somehow
I had become enfolded
in that time
when you were there.
I felt almost as if I were in
a state of grace
and perhaps I was, because
after the moment passed
I realized how much I’d
taken for granted
growing up in Idylwood
and understood
for the first time
why you cried so hard
when you and your mother
moved away.
For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.
