Best Ohio River Poems

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...

Continue reading...

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...

Continue reading...

lights flicker on the far side
as Kentucky folds its dark robes

a barge nudges
the river into dusk

bundles of clouds kindle

a shimmering pause

the river opens its body
to swallow the sun

knee deep in shadow
a heron yawps 

silver fish ripple through
shoaling branches

here on a crooked pier
spawning stars surface
from the...

Continue reading...

The boat rocks gently under a reddening sun;
is it wrong to wish for a Viking funeral,
to ponder a last journey West
into the dying light?

I could rest my soul here in this skiff
on this long warm wave of evening;
allowing the wooded lands, the sloping meadows,
the smoke-stacked...

Continue reading...

River Findings

The Ohio winds around hills
and streams down the hollows
passes steel mills, brick yards and scrap yards.
It carries tug boats, pushes barges, and hauls
black coal stripped from the mountainsides. 

The Ohio’s littered banks 
are home to train yards 
filled with graffiti-covered box cars
rusting relics of...

Continue reading...