Rivertown Rapture

By Joseph Hesch

With January's ice-scrim mist,

this riverside neighborhood

turns back to photo proof

black, white and gauzy gray.
Holiday colors have faded

like mid-September memories.

Tinder-dry evergreens,

erstwhile harlequin-lit window beacons

for passing ice-breakers,
now lay prostrate on streetside,
snow-dusted Christmas gravestones,

waiting for the herald crash

of the trash collecting Rapture.

And the perennial trees
standing sentinel nearby

at snow-footed attention,

look like lean black guardsmen,

their uniforms on backorder

until a too faraway Spring.

This week I wrote a poem that came from my walks and runs along the Hudson shore over the past 20 years. During the holidays, you could see the gumdrop-lit Christmas trees in windows over in Rensselaer. By early January, they were gone, the snow had come and the ice had choked the river. "Rivertown Rapture" is what I recall and imagine of those days. I've linked it up to dVerse Poets Pub's Open Link Night, where you'll find scores of other such imaginings and remembrances.

This Silent Night

By Joseph Hesch

Standing on the back porch,
11:39 PM on the 24th.
I’m cold and the chill air frosts
my nose and glasses. 
This is nothing new 
for a late December night,
but something’s different.
The wind chimes dingle-ding
just as they do in August. 
The trees sway and creak
as they did last month
and the months before that.
Perception stretching beyond
fading frame of consciousness,
maybe to snare hoped-for revelation,
I realize it isn't what I’m sensing
that's off. It’s what I’m not.

Over behind the big trees,
and the red-brick suburban bedsteads
lightly snoring smoke into the sky,
the normal hum and howl of
late-night on the Interstate
is absent.
I realize it’s because this is
That Night and travelers are safe
with their own, I hope.
And I want to stay here,
not travel another step,
to breathe in all this cold and quiet,
and breathe out crystaline clouds,
silent hymns of joy.
To be one with
this Silent Night.


Here's a little Christmas Eve poem that was inspired by standing on the same back step as my summer poem, "Illuminati." It's a true response I had to standing there waiting for my golden-haired semi-muse Mollie to do her thing (What else is new?) the late evening of December 24, 2009. Consider it my Christmas card to you, in thanks for the support you've given me in this first year of blogging poetry. I've linked "This Silent Night" up to dVerse Poets Pub for the crew's Open Link Night.

The Trip In

By Joseph Hesch

In winter, the commute’s the same,
but the trip is so different.
I drive these glazed donut highways,
clogged commuter arteries
that would give me a heart attack
if I let them, or if I had the heart
for all this anymore.
Headed east to work yesterday I could
barely make out the stop-and-go
chain gang of prisoners in our
four-wheel jail cells because of
the low aspect of Warden Winter's
bloodshot eye, with which I played
the staredown game.
blink
Lost again. I always lose.

I could put the car in neutral
and still make it a couple of miles
before I would have to touch the wheel,
change my course from the
unnatural migration of which I am part.
Some birds are just like me,
they don’t migrate from this chill either.
I see them out my driver’s side window,
chains of starlings, shivering wing-to-wing,
stretching pole-to-pole --
roadside rosaries praying
for bread and a compass
that points south.

And now the final snowy flair
to a winter commute begins.
Flakes so big I can hear them
hit the window and so heavy
the trees will bow to their gravity,
their serious intent to remind me
who's really boss on my trip in.
This snow-light December
will turn into a bully soon enough,
snapping me awake to its will
with all the comfort of a white,
wet blanket whipped towel-like
to my bucket-seated backside.


If you know anything about me--real me and poet me--you know I have this love/hate relationship with winter and my workday world. Put them together and you come up with "The Trip In," this week's effort for dVerse Poets Pub's Open Link Night.

A Twelvemonth's Tears

By Joseph Hesch

The December weather has edges
and sharp points, like a star 
atop the Christmas tree. 
When I inhale, the air feels 
of peppermint but the flavor
favors woodsmoke from
my neighbor's fireplace.
It's during these nights, 
under a stardust canopy 
and a searchlight moon,
my eyes sting and water a bit. 
Not sure if it's from the the cold, 
the smoke, or the need to 
sweep the cinders
of another year from them.
Or perhaps this year
it's to wipe the spillings
of an old year away to prepare
for a brighter new one.
Perhaps.

Nightfall, Another November

By Joseph Hesch

I stepped outside at 5:00 and another November struck me

like a black bolt of ash -- the darkness of early sundown,

the steely chill of snow-threatening clouds,

and a near-deafening din that drowned out the wind.

The colors of October long ago disappeared, 

fallen to the ankles of once brightly outfitted trees

that stood as beacons for weekend leaf peepers.

They now reached skyward in scraggly stick-'em-up 

posture, robbed of their raiment

by frost and frigid currents. Shivering sentinels, 
the skeleton maples, hickories and oaks,

found their bony limbs decorated by hundreds of 
nattering neighbors in jet, keeping with
the dark end of the month’s gray-scale color scheme.

Advent ornaments, lit by sundown, shiny and black,
adorned the branches. Ebony leaves full of cawing cacophony. 

At dawn, these gravity-defying decorations disappear,

falling up and away, shed in an anti-autumn explosion

of feathers, noise, and bad intent,

onyx scavengers crowing their ascendancy

over a napping Nature.

And I feel the bones of another of my years
about to be picked clean.


As I walked from my office to the parking lot the other night, I heard the racket from hundreds of crows festooning the trees surrounding the campus where I work. They are a foul nuisance, but one heck of an inspiration...if I'm mindful enough to use them. They stirred up "Nightfall, Another November."  Linking this poem up to dVerse Poets Pub for its Open Link Night.

The Answer

By Joseph Hesch

Outside, early morning, mid-December
and the howling wind is strumming a
C-chord through the trees.
Even above that din, I hear
the familiar tones overhead.

There, moving in a diagonal,
like a sidewinder snaking south,
or a streamer of mercury sliding across
a wobbly zinc tabletop,
are half a hundred Canada geese.

And I shiver. Not because of the wind
and December's cold, but because
the unspeaking natural world had
once again addressed a question
I hadn't even known I was asking.

The question I couldn't
speak or write is answered across
the December sky in that language
without words, the one that speaks
more truth than that of Man:
It's never too late.



As I was working outside the other day, I heard in the distance something I used to not hear until it was just above my head (if at all). There, in ragged V winging south, was the first company of migrating Canada Geese I'd seen this Fall. I'm not sure why, but that incessant honking sound, some overlapping the others as if they were sound shadows, stirs some visceral response in me. I feel somehow energized and inspired. And so I was this time. Seeing them put me in mind of another group I had seen last year. I write about those travelers here.

My Island

By Joseph Hesch

The autumn rain lifted overnight,

and in the morning our road
seemed a seascape as I looked East,
a long black beach curving ahead of me.
The puddles were sun-mirrored tidal pools
surrounded by the final tossing
of russet shells from the oaks.
Above, a grand artist,
with wind-blown flourish,
had dry-brushed strokes of gray
over the white impastos He scattered
across a canvas of palest blue infinity.
And I, the sleepy suburban Crusoe,
breathed the sweet breeze of morning.

Oh, I’m as tired of writing sad, breast-beating, introspective poems as you probably are of reading them. So today, I went back to my initial source of inspiration. Pardon the pun, but I went back to Nature. My morning walks with Mollie almost always provided my groggy brain with some poetic fodder--shuffling little old men, honking geese, neon prisms of broken ice—but this one was as simple as it gets. I just looked at the road and sky and sucked in a breath of elation.

I decided to post this little poem for Week 10 of dVersePoet Pub’s Open Link Night. If you like to read poetry from a world-wide cast of verse wranglers, you really should pay a visit to the pub, where my friend and poetic fairy godmother Claudia Schoenfeld is in charge tonight. And don't be afraid to leave a comment here and there. Especially, well...here!

No Encore

By Joseph Hesch

Autumn came on-stage
right after Summer
finished its hot set.
In its unfettered joy,
the audience of maples
clapped their weather-reddened
hands off.
This begged the question:
Was this standing "O"
for the warmup
or for the headliner?

Canadas

By Joseph Hesch

In the chill of the pondside dawn, 
the rushes part and feathered
bundles  trundle ashore.
They’re difficult  to see in the dim light,
given their formal attire of  gray and black,
their great bodies topped like cellos
with long curved necks and headstocks.
They applaud their own entrances
upon the morning stage, great wings
stretching. beating and refolding.
You can hear their humble efforts at
playing like Yo Yo Ma, all squee-unks and chuffs,
yet there’s an enchantment in the echo
and fade of that music.
From each of the itinerant players
comes a greater magic in their voices– 
frosty clouds of white, explicit in their
warmth, greeting, calling, community.
Their morning messages form,
then lift to drift and disappear within
the crystalline cloud that slept with them
on the pond last night.
Shortly, the northbound ensemble shoves
off from its marsh moorings, rising in a
ragged, streamered vee, disappearing into the
newly-risen cloud voices calling it home.

Update (9/19/11): Today I walked past the spot where Mollie and I saw this story unfold and it's messed up with construction equipment and half-built concrete buildings. Sigh. That makes me sad. At least I have the vision of this poem to remind me that once we were a way station for those travelers heading to and from their North and South homes.