PASSING THROUGH


Some years later
I find myself in Savage, Maryland ,
Late one December afternoon:
A gray rain, smearing grime on windshields,
Refracts the light of oncoming headlamps
Along the beltways, dense, clogged:
People going home in
The strange five o’clock darkness of this place.
A passer through, I kill time in an old woolen mill,
Stylishly recycled as a mall of little shops,
The way they do these days,
Where well dressed young women sell each other
Things they do not need.
Trains roll by on the edge of history’s evening.
Why did I think I did not like it here,
A boy growing up long ago,
And why do these tired streets
Still have somehow a feel of home?
There, flush against the sidewalk,
Those sad, Germanic houses,
Each window, edge and angle
Outlined by strings of lights,
Garish blues and yellows,
UnChristmas-like greens
Pierce the dreary dampness.
A circuit is completed:
Time I thought I’d killed
Jumps across forty years
And I am in another town
Not unlike this one,
Nor very far from here
Where people no longer remember me.

appeared in Sophomore Jinx Winter 1995 and Underground Window June 2006



Robert Demaree is the author of three collections of poems, including Fathers and Teachers, published April 2007 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, where he lives five months of the year. He has had over 300 poems published or accepted by 90 periodicals. For further information see http://www.demareeepoetry.blogspot.com