Rapture in Rivertown

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 once-evergreens,
erstwhile harlequin window beacons
for passing ice-breakers,
now lie exhausted on streetside,
snow-dusted Christmas gravestones,
waiting for the herald crash and call
of the trash collecting Rapture.

And ice-darkened perennial trees,
stand sentinel nearby
at snow-footed attention,
lean black cemetery guardsmen,
their uniforms on backorder
until a too faraway Spring.

This poem 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. “Rapture in Rivertown” is what I recall and imagine of those days.

– Joseph Hesch

© 2014, poem and photograph, Joseph Hesch, All rights reserved

JOSEPH HESCH (A Thing for Words) is a writer and poet from Albany, New York , an old friend of Bardo and a new core team member. Joe’s work is published in journals and anthologies coast-to-coast and worldwide. He posts poems and stories-in-progress on his blog, A Thing for Words.  An original staff member at dVerse Poets Pub website, Joe was named one of Writers Digest Editor Robert Lee Brewer’s “2011 Best Tweeps for Writers to Follow.” He is also a member of the Grass Roots Poetry Group and featured in their 2013 poetry anthology Petrichor Rising.