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Summer Cottage
by Robert Demaree

 

For years we kept the cottage as though
My father, long dead, had just stepped out:
On a hook, his fishing hat, license dated 1973.
My mother's paperback mysteries,
Their pages like dried leaves,
Wait on shelves for passage
To church bazaars whence they came,
Along with house wares from the barn sales
Of a more trusting time.
What, beyond inconvenience, occasions this,
Shall we say, deaccessioning of artifacts
In a shrine to people who aren't coming back?
Maybe that the grandchildren arrive next week,
Innocent harbingers of mortality,
(That a life we made could make a life),
Or just that some memories are enough.
Wait: there on the shelf--
My father's casting plug,
A Fred Arbogast Jitterbug ("Noisy action kills bass").
You will see them now and again in antique malls,
But not this one.

 

"Summer Cottage" appeared in Underground Window June 2006