Watching From a Skiff On the Ohio River

Herons fragment the mist, appear and disappear while remaining motionless. The skiff rocks as a coal barge trundles past. A dewy sky shivers. Nowadays he just sits in a boat looking at Ohio. This morning the sun reached the top of a willow and got stuck. He rowed toward the bank thinking to get under the tree, filled an imaginary pipe full of tangy river smoke, sucked on the wet air as he watched the tree struggling with the sun. For a while it was a tussle, then the willow shook itself and the sun slipped away like an unmoored ketch. At first, the sun just hovered like a blanched balloon then it found a window above the mounded smother and it rose up like a Choctaw bass about to mouth a trill of small fry. He was near to the shore now, Ohio slanted down to meet him cattails and reeds scratching the aluminum hull. A couple of mallards jumped out of nowhere and flew over his eyes. The clatter of wings ruffled the chill bank where a dank light had sunk. His mind followed them for some time until they settled deep down amid a wraith-wrapped Kentucky. A heron slowly rowed the wind stirring up the vaporous air, Patches of clarity drifted across sky-high filtering puddles. Ohio becomes a river town, the huddled houses have scuttled their roofs upon soggy pathways. The mossy hulks of an abandoned industry wallow in a foggy backwash. Castaway wharfs drip a spatter and smear, a hand me down script of a yesteryear. A small blue-collar marina, beer cans roll on swaying pontoons, a couple of dry docked rowboats and canoes. Truck tires thump harbor chains. Someone is up early, someone else watches him gut and clean a large flathead. On the damp dock cats circle the bones and scales creep through the miasma their fur wet and glistening eyes flashing a liquid silver. The catfish is naked and shorn of the river a thing to be watched least it return to life as something beyond the ken of cats and fishermen. On the ramp he hitches up his straggling life and drives away from a berth awash with the haunted cries of Loons and Redtail’s. Soon he will be back in the patched-up pockets of Ohio where corn husks snag hoarfrost and rattle in a fresh rinsing breeze.