Tag Archives: travel

2025, Autumn, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, prose, Prose Poem, psychogeography, travel

Was a time, I’d bring Fall home in my rucksack

During my traveling days, I preferred to go during transitional seasons. Fall was my favorite time, and I’d go north, against the migration of birds. I’d go to the mountains, or to big sky country, where the season unfurls earlier, go in search of the dying expressions of the leaves: red, orange, yellow, the resistant evergreens. There are lessons to be learned from the last gasp of beauty before the trees stand naked, bare armed against the coming winter.  It is possible to relearn the smell of the air before the weather changes, before rain; the cold prelude kiss of an early snowfall… things forgotten in an age of digitized hyper-realities and Hallmark memories of a man-made world that never really existed. And when I arrived back to home’s warm arms, I unpacked and set it free: the bright dying, the scent of the air.

It was the only homecoming gift I could think of that mattered.

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2025, Days, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry

Days 2025: Winter (23-26)

Day 23

suppose these days are icicles:
someday we will melt we will evaporate

into a river of apocalypses, singing songs
from some lost decade or another.

let us pretend, if only for this moment
this dream is a flood 41 days long

and on the other side, there is a distant shoreline
resplendent with possibility.

Day 24

yesterday’s thin ice patches that floated on the river
have vanished today. practice then

the transubstantiative life of water
finding new breath in a flurry of forms

responding to the air
as to a lover’s hands on the skin

Day 25

then: these quiet moments, given short shrift on calendars
with the dogs, that ungrateful cat, and you

that make up all of my eternities

Day 26

morning on the wharf — a quiet mass
in a sanctuary of steel and wood, surrounded

by grey and black remainders of the last snow
the air just warm enough to lie

that we are not still far from the summer sun

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2024, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose

from ‘the river north to South Point’

11.02.2024 / 1454 hrs

First cup of Coffee. Three hours until watch.

Crossed into Ohio / Ky part of the river. We’re just south of Cincinnati, the City on Seven Hills.

The heat went out on the boat, but the good guys on the tug topped off our water tank.

I both over thought and under thought this trip in terms of packing. I’ve been off the road so long I’ve forgotten what I’m like and what I will need… particularly base layers, not because it’s cold, especially, but because of exposure. I have plenty of layers, and I’m not worried. But I need to remember this.

For all the unromantic and unglamorous aspects of my job, the romantic in my core can not be denied. I love this job, this work, more by the day. Out here on the dirty sacred river, floating north to South Point, somewhere below Cincinnati, I am reexperiencing my home… my larger home… in a profound way. It’s all beautiful and terrible and lonesome and glorious, this congregation of the river.

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