Robert Demaree- Three Poems

JUNE 2011

Before the season:

Arriving in New Hampshire:

Rhododendron blooms.

Cottage door opens:

Scent of camphor, closed pine rooms.

Winter yields to spring.

Where last year’s beavers

Took out our best clothes line tree,

Sprouts of new green life.

JANUARY SONGS

1. Procedures

Extractions easier than remembered,

Weakening in what holds things in place.

Did I want to keep the tooth, she asked.

It wasn’t gold, I said No,

Imagining a day down the road,

A spleen, say, or gall bladder,

No, throw it away—

A planned organic obsolescence.

This afternoon, in a cold rain,

We took a plant to a friend

Who goes to hospice tomorrow.

2. Dinner Guest

He still says we, of course,

Uses the present tense,

Slicing gravely into

A company chicken dish,

The fourth chair pushed

Back against the wall.

He spears an asparagus

And speaks of her, their life.

Good, we think:

Past cheerful feigning.

There will be other dinners,

More breasts of chicken,

Pounded, stuffed, rolled,

(This is not a new idea,

A curve not apt to change)

Until at length one of us the guest.

AT THE STAFF RETREAT 1991

1.

At the conference center

The staff retreat glides on:

Flip charts rustle, paradigms shift.

Outside the picture window

Snow falls hypnotically in the woods:

My screen saver.

2.

Memos float mindlessly

Table to table.

A message passes somewhere

Between eye and mind;

I affix initials and pass it on

To the low drone of

Speakers making earnest points,

The furnace cutting on and off:

So what I hear us saying is...

Soon another note appears:

“This does not apply to you.

Erase your initials

And initial the erasure.”

“At the Staff Retreat” appeared in Whisper January 2012

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 600 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