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.

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.

Backstage at The Firmament

By Joseph Hesch

Come the Fall, the sky grows wider,
blacker, starrier as each night
the trees undress and become skinnier,
like movie starlets
trying to make a name for themselves
above some blockbuster's title.
I become smaller now, a bit less significant
against the ever more vast darkness.
If that net of stars should drop
upon the now-drowsy Earth,
I bet I could slip through it and
peek backstage at The Firmament,
catching angels and gods in dishabille,
like the maples and starlets,
their wings and auras hanging from hooks
fashioned from mortal prayers
for another good harvest
or more nights like this.


Image: EQUINOX, by Alison Jardine

This Boy's Life

By Joseph Hesch

I took a walk by myself yesterday

and recalled how much I always loved

just walking and watching. 

"Woolgathering," Grandma called it.

"You're wasting time, little boy," she'd preach.

Years and years of it have reaped me a lot of wool,

or maybe just the dust of memories by now.

An ancient tree in the park caught my attention.

It knew I was coming; its limbs waved me down.

And on the edge of the yawning mouth

in the tree's face—a gash big enough

for a bear to hide in—

rose an impudent squirrel.

He hurled me a lesson full of sound and

fury on behalf of his silent old host,

a fiery flicking tongue testifying there's some life

left in the old boy, and chit-chitting his pride

that he's a big piece of it.

That's when I realized how much I loved my

walks and secret conversations with the world.

I don't feel like I've wasted all of those memories.

I carry their dust in my bones, I'm sure.

They just need to be reconstituted

by fresh perspective and the miracle voices.

Now I collect them, commit them to paper,

and share them with the nascent me,

that fiery, furry—or is it wooly?—

young poem maker who

resides inside this dry old hide. 

Photo by Ruban Phukan

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?