Best Ohio River Poems
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 the Southern Pacific
and the Norfolk and Southern railroads.
Erector set bridges span
the murky river and link Ohio
to “Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia,”
the Weirton Mill,
and Homer Laughlin China Company.
In towns called Powhaton Point,
Shadyside, Bellaire, and East Liverpool,
houses are stacked on hillsides
with an array of slate,
tin and asbestos shingled roofs.
Ball fields and corn fields,
concrete parking lots and shopping malls
are full of busy people
who fail to appreciate
the river’s charity.
There are roads with cryptic names like Goose Run,
Pinch Run, Riddles Run, and Rush Run.
There are towns named Brilliant,
Costonia and Calcutta,
each with their own secrets.
North on Route 7 bars advertise Karaoke
and all you can eat fish fries.
A plethora of car lots and gift shops,
bait stores and gun supplies
dot the countryside with
a never-ending display
of marketing profanity,
but the river rolls on
never compromising her dignity
never surrendering her boundaries.
White-steepled churches
stand like beacons of redemption,
while billboards promote“Hell Fire Fireworks,”
“Gentlemen’s” clubs, sleazy motels
and the “Forbidden Zone Exit.”
Still the river moves along
around the hills and down the hollows
proud and powerful
chanting and rippling with satisfaction
a stalwart testament to her tenacity…
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.
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.
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 milky eyes
of the recently drowned
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 barge brimming ports,
the patched up river towns to slip on by
under the kindling sails of evening clouds.
Night slips into the river.
I hitch the boat to a stump of land,
still imagining a Viking ending,
but also resigned that tomorrow -
will be one more place to play with fire.