Chris and Rollo

Chris and Rollo

Saturday, April 17, 2010

RIVER FRONT

I used to walk the river front
At the foot of Cherry Street
‘Til morning, Sunday morning, rain or shine,
It was cleaner in the rain, I saw clearer in the puddles
In the brightly speckled windshields
Under street lamps 'neath the span
Among the cranes and the dump trucks,
The girders and the steel beams
Languishing ‘til Monday's varied uses found them
Undisturbed by my harmless trespass.
In the steel garden of corrugated weed
Twists of tin and molded alloy, piles of stone,
Barrels of debris and burnt things, once real objects
Gone to chunks and cinders that smell, that choke
And cake the nostrils with memory's poverty... briefly.
Then the rain ... the rain washes, the salt river rises
Rushing one night, lazy and stubborn
Next night, shimmering and glazed
Another night, the wide-mouthed bay
Welcomes whatever it has to bring along to the deep
The cold deep, this warm shower
Sunday soothing rough edges facing east
Glimmering greenish like old burnished metal
In the first dull hints of dawn
Imprints swept by rivulets to sewer grates,
Manhole eddies, the streetlights red yellow green
Pierce the relentless, unforgiving grey
Black and grey, and starless blue in the rain
Where the bridge overhead reigns, lords over
Everything in sight this night.

© Celeste Plowden 2010

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