Postcard Collection by Robert Demaree

1. 2003
A photo of a country tearoom,
Wenham, Mass.,
“Marjorie’s luncheon, June 7, 1923,”
She wrote, dark hand slanted,
Firm with authority.
I type a label for the hard plastic sleeve:
“Bought August 24, 2003,
Lee, New Hampshire,
40th wedding anniversary.
Drove along the Oyster River,
To a shore dinner at Dover Point,”
Lives now linked
For the consideration
Of the next collector.

2. 2014
It was one of those old albums
Where people would store
Souvenir Postcards from the past,
Yellowstone, Lincoln Park Zoo, 1910,
Streets in small Midwestern towns
Like the one where my father grew up.

We knew each other from
Collecting postcards, then poetry,
As friends and then neighbors.
So I thought the album
Must have been a find
From those antique shows
They used to love.
But the gift he brought me
Was a family piece,
A resident of closets and attics over time,
The world of Miss Millie Johns
Of Hobart, Indiana,
Passed on to Tom and now to me.
You can sell them, he told me.
I will not do that.
I will be the steward of
The memories of Millie Johns,
I will protect those messages
From careless eyes.

3. 2018
My collection of old postcards
Takes me back to places of fondness
And to others I have not been,
Often scenes with people
In the near ground.
Here is a beach view,
Rye, New Hampshire,
Young men with shirts on for
Swimming, apparel that dates them,
Long departed,
On another a man and his little girl.
He must have seen the photographer
And decided that though nameless
They would record themselves
Into a kind of perpetuity.
This is a town in the Finger Lakes.
Those look like ’50 model cars,
So the man is surely gone by now,
And the daughter, I’m guessing,
About my age.

4. 2020
Turrets. Lots of old postcards
With turrets, vintage 1910,
A bank in Buffalo,
Residential streets in Rust Belt towns,
Tastes of another time,
Popular for a while, then not,
Then briefly in vogue again.
Why am I drawn to this?
It comes back,
As of course it always does:
The corner grocery on King Street,
Between Gerry’s house and mine,
Where we would stop in late afternoon,
After a game of catch, or basketball,
One-against-one, the basket his prize
Mounted on the garage
Behind the house on High Street,
Sooty snow shoveled out of the way,
Chevy dealer next door,
His home, his father’s office,
Both of them cardiologists,
As it turned out,
Who smoked cigarettes.
There were turrets on the
Fine houses still left on High Street,
And on the little store
Where we’d get a cherry popsicle
And talk about the Phillies and the A’s
With Mr. Schneider
Whose family lived upstairs,
In the round room, we called it,
Over the Breyer’s ice cream sign.

Gerry died quite young.

We exchanged Christmas cards
And, toward the end,
An e-mail or two.
Mr. Schneider left no heirs.
I hardly get back
To Pennsylvania at all.
I guess they still make
Cherry popsicles.



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.