Robert Demaree- Three Poems

GROCERY SHOPPING, EASTER MORNING

The supermarket is not crowded:

Shoppers up and down the aisles

With a calm seriousness,

Notebooks of coupons, unadvertised specials,

A kind of reverence, the sense that

Perhaps they should be somewhere else.

For some it is like any other Sunday,

With its own rituals:

Young couples in tennis get-ups

Admire their children, make plans.

An older couple ponders produce:

For her it is a day fraught

With memory, a father gone;

For him, one of two days in the year

When those metaphoric readings

Simply will not fly.

YESTERDAY’S SNOW

Midnight: an unexpected snow

Brightens our court at Golden Pines,

Thick whiteness caught in amber streetlight,

Moist cotton balls, fluffy on our small trees

In the clear Piedmont dawn.

It’s beautiful, our neighbors say,

Thinking of other places they have lived.

On my seventieth birthday I drive into town for barbecue,

Listening to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons,

Their soaring falsetto harmonies

From sorrowful New Jersey towns

Not far from my own,

The undertow of time,

Those unchangeable places of our birth

That took some of us a while to figure out.

At the funeral home, the casket truck,

Up from Mississippi, makes a stop:

The routineness of it.

It is afternoon, sixty degrees,

And, of course, the Carolina snow is gone,

Except for fringes in the roof’s shadow,

And by the curb, graying,

Like other snows I’ve seen.

“Yesterday’s Snow” appeared in Poets’ Touchstone Winter 2009

CLOSING COSTS

Muffled in the rustling of papers,

Sign here, initial there:

We have sold the house:

Fifty years,

Same family, same ’phone number.

Scott and Alice are young;

They will redecorate

With colors I do not need to see.

What follows we choose to call

The next part and not the last.

Alice will have to pick up

The rest of the fallen camellia blooms.

“Closing Costs” appeared in Still Crazy January 2008

Robert Demaree is the author of four collections of poems, including Fathers and Teachers (2007) and Mileposts (2009), both published by Beech River Books. The winner of the 2007 Conway, N.H., Library Poetry Award, he is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in the eastern U.S. He has had over 550 poems published or accepted by 125 periodicals in the U.S., Canada and U.K., including Cold Mountain Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Miller’s Pond, MediaVirus, Bolts of Silk, Louisville Review and Paris/Atlantic, and in four anthologies including the 2008 and 2010 editions of Poet’s Guide to New Hampshire and Celebrating Poets over 70.. For further information see http://www.demareepoetry.blogspot.com