Fire On the Ohio River

My boat rocks gently under a reddening sun, is it wrong to wish for a Viking burial, to ponder a last journey West into the dying light? Strangers have always been my friends, they intuit the liquid and inflammable nature of this thing we do. I could rest my soul here in this skiff on this one long warm wave of evening; let the wooded lands and sloping meadows, the dredged, smoke-stacked barge brimming ports, the patched up river towns slip on by under the kindling sails of evening clouds. I am laid out like a homeless person bundled up in my rags and tinder, a shadow in a small boat, drifting. Night falls to the water the words of strangers flame high fire starters and their poems gleaming as the dark rushes in. I hitch the boat to a stump of land, still imagining a Viking funeral, but also resigned to a tomorrow - yet another strange place to play with this fire.