I was a librarian for thirty-four years, and for most of them I wrote poems on the backs of overdue notices and put them in a shoebox. When I retired in 1996 the shoebox went up to the attic, and then last winter my granddaughter came home from college and said, "Grandma, you should put those on the Internet," and set up this page for me before I could think of a reason not to. So here they are, dusted off. They are short and plain, because that's how I talk. Most are about the things I can see from where I'm sitting: the yard, the kitchen, the town, the year going around. A few rhyme. I have never been able to decide whether I approve of rhyme, so I use it when it comes and leave it alone when it doesn't.

Read them slowly, if you would. That's the only instruction.

The maple on the corner goes first,
every year, a week before the others,
like the one child in the class
who has already read the book.

I used to hurry past it on the way to work.
Now I stand under it with the mail in my hand
and let it tell me the whole story,
which I know,
which I want to hear again.

Forty-one years I have washed dishes
looking out at the same square of yard.
The clothesline is gone. The swing set is gone.
The neighbor's dog is the fourth neighbor's dog.

What stays is the light,
how it comes in low across the sink in October
and finds the one glass I missed
and makes something of it.

I keep the window clean for that.
Not for the view. For the finding.

He planted the tomatoes too close together
every year, and every year I said so,
and every year we had more tomatoes
than two people could reasonably eat.

This spring I put them in myself,
the right distance apart, the way the book says.
They came up thin and orderly
and gave me exactly enough.

I stood at the end of the row in August
with the basket half full
and understood, finally, that it was never
about the tomatoes.

Next year I will crowd them.
I will give the extra to the neighbors
and say, as he said, I don't know
what got into them this year.

At ten to nine I'd flick the lights,
once, the way you do,
and watch the readers surface
from wherever they had been:
the boy in the atlas, gone to sea;
the widow in the mysteries, who liked
that somebody, at least, was getting answers;
the old man who read the paper
he could not afford to take at home,
folding it back the way he found it, always.

They'd blink and gather up their coats
and file past me like a congregation,
and I'd stamp their books and say good night
and mean it more than I could tell them.

Then the click of the lock,
and the building settling around its shelves,
ten thousand voices going quiet
all at once,
and mine the last one out.

The bank became a flower shop, the flower shop a bank;
the five-and-dime's a parking lot, and who is there to thank?
The diner's changed its name three times but not its cherry pie,
and everyone still calls it what it was, and so do I.

The high school's built a bigger gym; the mill's been shut for years;
the boys who left for somewhere else come home with souvenirs
and stand out on the sidewalk squinting up at what is gone,
and say it's smaller than I thought, and then they carry on.

But Tuesday there's a casserole on someone's porch by eight,
and Sunday there's a folding chair for anybody late,
and when I fell in February, seven people knew
before I'd got my boot back on. There's that. That's small-town, too.

It follows the car, she says,
because it likes us.
It gets small because it is far
and it is far because it is shy.
On the nights you can't see it
it is checking on the other side.

I have read the encyclopedia.
I have read a good deal more than that.
I said, That's right, sweetheart,
and I do not think I lied.

It came in the night without asking
and by morning had said everything it meant to say:
the fence posts capped, the birdbath filled,
the last chrysanthemums bowed down and forgiven.

No footprints yet. The paper not yet thrown.
The whole street holding its breath
as if the town were new,
as if nothing had happened here at all.

I put the kettle on and stood at the door
in my coat over my nightgown
and was, for the length of one cup,
the only person in the world,
and did not mind.

Things I have lost this year:
one glove, the good one;
the name of the actor in that picture;
the ability to read the small print on the aspirin;
Harold's brother, in March;
the trick of sleeping through the night.

Things I have found:
the glove, in April, in the other coat;
that you can ask a child to read the aspirin;
that 4 a.m. has its own birds,
a whole shift of them I never knew about,
clocking in.

I saw an old woman at the bus stop today
in a good wool coat that had seen better days,
with a library book and a sensible hat,
and I thought, I know her. Now who is that?

She had Mother's chin and my sister's stoop
and a way of standing a bit apart from the group,
and she looked at the sky as if reading a page,
and I liked her, I thought, whatever her age.

Then the bus pulled up with its window of glass,
and I watched her climb on, and I watched myself pass,
and I laughed out loud, and the driver said, Ma'am?
and I said, Nothing. I just saw who I am.

A shoebox of poems.
A dress I will not fit again and will not give away.
His fishing hat.
The crib, in pieces, waiting for whoever's next.
Christmas, eleven months of the year.
Heat, in August, enough to bake bread.

And one small window, at the peak,
that looks out over every roof in town,
that nobody has looked through in years
but me, just now, coming up for the box,
and staying.

Some other pages I visit: Charcoal & Coffee: A Sketchbook Online (a young art student, next on the ring, whose drawings I like very much), The Amateur Cellist, Women in Science: A Reading List (a librarian never stops making lists), and Theo's Theater Page, whose owner runs the Stage Door WebRing and kindly let me in.