Richard Hague
Richard Hague is author or editor of more than 20 volumes of prose and poetry, most recently Continued Cases (Dos Madres Press 2023). He served as Writer and Artist-in-residence at Thomas More University from 2015-2022 and was 2021-22 President of the Literary Club of Cincinnati. He is an Ohio Co-Poet of the Year (1984) and winner of the 2013 Weatherford Award in Poetry.
Villages of Smoke
Their names linger on
bullet-drilled rusting
road signs: Rush Run,
Dilles Bottom, a village
called Fly.
Once river towns
with fires in their hair
and wet feet,
they have shrunken
like corpses
of mudpuppies and carp.
At night you walk
their streets,
step over ghosts
lying on their backs,
arms thrown out,
mummies of ash
and furnace clinkers.
Their mouths are open Os
moaning under birdsong,
brittle, low.
What’s left of the fires,
open hearths and Bessemer converters,
abandoned oil wells,
backyard trashburn bins—
even basement coal furnaces?
Ghosts of flame,
zombies of blue methane.
Gone, all those eaters of the air
that moneyed the pockets
of hundreds of thousands,
Ohio Power,
Wheeling Steel,
Pennsylvania Railroad.
Near gone is Tiltonsville,
near gone Rayland, near gone
in smokehaze and fog
the lightless village
called Brilliant.
