The author has a haunting sensation as he walks through a Victorian town after the summer season ends.

JANUARY IN CAPE MAY, NJ
By Francis Eaden

Cape May, the Painted Lady,
Stoically watches the seasons come and go.
Rarely alone; never an “off-season,” so they say.
The frantic tourist season “is just a week or two away.”

Herring gulls wait in forlorn groups,
Like funeral directors standing by to serve,
Dressed in gray, and whites, and blacks,
The cold west wind ruffles the feathers on their backs.

The sky, the beach, the ocean waves;
A collage in shades of gray.
A blackness streaks across the watercolor sky:
A traveler; a hawk just passing by,
And then it flies away.

The houses stand and watch the town,
Victoriana verite’: “Too much is not enough!”
Festooned with lacework shawls of snow, and here and there a muff,
Their painted faces still proclaim, “Too much is not enough!”

A hundred houses, and two hundred more, no two are quite the same,
Line the cobbled streets, soft-lit by gaslight flame.
Limned in all the shades of spring and autumn flowers,
bedecked with hand-carved shingles, shutters,
widow’s walks, and towers.

I love it here, this time of year.
The empty-windowed houses are so still,
As I make my way along those narrow lanes.
I have the feeling something watches,
Something old, behind those frosted panes.


Copyright Francis Eaden 1997