Pennsylvania Songs by Robert Demaree

FIELDER’S CHOICE

A small bedroom,
In the apartment at the boarding school
Where my father taught:
My parents tiptoe in to tell me,
Not quite ten, not quite asleep,
That the Philadelphia A’s have purchased
A slugging right-fielder.
Nothing came of it, of course.
The A’s finished last,
Moved on, not once but twice,
Shibe Park a dream deep in urban rubble.
O, Eddie Joost;
O, Elmer Valo:
Lost warriors of that last perfect recalling
Of childhood, the pull of home,
Empty steel mills in a town
By a weary river.

MIKE FREEDMAN AT WINTERCROFT SCHOOL: 1950

1. At our little grade school,
Progressive—wooden bungalows,
Open air, dim light in winter,
Blankets brought from home—
Mike Freedman and I were the jesters:
Instead of learning our Latin declensions
We devised a synthetic tongue
We called Reboshkan
And began an epic on Der Fertz,
Garbage Man of Rheims in the Time of Charlemagne.
Tom Carlisle, our wise headmaster,
Cut us some slack,
Allowed us to perform at lunch
Parodies set to tunes
We sang in Music class—
“It was from Tom Carlisle’s big beer party
We were seeing Nellie home.”
Mr. Carlisle let us have a baseball team.
To put nine on the field
We had to use fifth graders,
Even girls. Gerry pitched and I caught.
Michael didn’t play.
He did earn a doctorate, I think.
It did not come to us until later
How much we owed Tom Carlisle.

2. I wonder from time to time
What became of Mike—
Went off to boarding school
After eighth grade,
Wound up, we heard or imagined,
A professor of something somewhere.
He was our age but seemed older,
With a vast and profane knowledge.
Gerry and I marveled, were puzzled
At the information he possessed
About girls, about private parts.
Gerry died some years ago
Of those cigarettes we shared
In the sad back alleys
Of those young Rust Belt days.
Without success I’ve looked for Mike
On the Internet, curious
With that urge that comes
Of being 80
To learn how things turned out,
A baroque quartet
Come back around,
A resolving, a tying off.

RIDGE PIKE

The poet was talking about his father:
You’d think after all these years, he said,
I’d have this figured out.
Set me rummaging
Through the messy desk drawer of time:
Gray December drives down Ridge Pike—
Norristown, Manyunk—
To Shibe Park, could have been Fenway
But took culture’s wrong turn instead.
He bought sherry by the gallon.
I did not know what this meant,
Long before juried chardonnay.
One night—I must have been ten—
He sat on my bed and
Explained in the dark
A boarding school teacher’s
Net worth.
He lived long enough, I guess,
To be proud of me.



Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders, published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.