Reserved Reading by Robert Demaree

          for Harry Brown

The professor is downsizing, a juncture
He had known would come,
And so he passes on folders of readings,
Articles xeroxed, underlined, annotated, stapled—
Whitman, Dickinson, Cummings, Frost—
To a friend who fancies himself a poet.
And here are the names of
Bill Keith and Allison Jacobs,
Who availed themselves of
The reserved shelf
In the college library one afternoon
In 1988.
They may have found life to be a paragraph,
Roads taken or not.
They will not know
They have wound up in my files.

My friend says I can discard the folders
But I will not do that.
One day someone will find his name
And Bill’s and Allison’s
In my papers, articles of trust, the tenuous thread
Linking us together,
Through Whitman, Dickinson, Cummings and Frost,
Back to Homer, whose wandering hero
Gave us that sense
Of a search for home.



Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders, published in June 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club, and have appeared in over 150 periodicals. A retired educator, he resides in Wolfeboro, N.H. and Burlington, N.C.