In the Foothills, Jasper Glen, 2024.
Three poems
Eric Chiles
Bicentennial Baby
It has been 48 years
since that transformative day.
Can it be almost half a century?
We had already made one
precautionary trip thanks
to false labor. Waiting room
chairs don't make good
beds. This time, though, doc
decided to force the issue,
and you struggled out slathered
in vernix thick as cream cheese
streaked in birth's gore,
a vision undimmed by time,
miraculous today as then.
Up until that moment we had
been semi-independent
individuals traveling parallel.
But you changed that forever,
a revolution of identity forging
her and him into mother, father,
parents dumbfounded by you
swaddled in a bicentennial blanket.
Faith
Mount Rogers, Va., Appalachian Trail
With miles behind and many miles to go,
at night near the summit it's coal black
outside the tent, under the cover
of trees. But in the clearing, starlight
punctuates the dark like bright water
falling from the heavens, suspended
in place and time yet imperceptibly
revolving above my head - all our heads
- creating an illusion of permanence.
Will this rocky green trail ever end?
Slicing the celestial lens like a cataract
of the soul is the Milky Way's shadow
spiraling to a black hole's cul de sac,
a one-way road killing my disbelief.
Loony
We're talking about black holes
and the cosmos when we reach
Cherry Springs State Park
--one of the darkest places
on the East Coast at night,
no city lights to pollute the sky,
where star gazers school
to scope supernovae—
before we hang a right to drive
eight more miles to Lyman Lake
where we bait our hooks
with red worms, wax worms,
bubble gum Power Bait
to catch Rainbow trout
that submarine like gray
Tridents beneath the water's
mirror before rocketing
through their event horizons
like shimmering blue
evenings spangled by stars.
As two loons yodel and plunge,
yodel and plunge,
gorging on beauty spawned
for beak or barb.
After a newspaper career Eric Chiles began teaching writing and journalism at colleges in eastern Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Third Wednesday, and elsewhere. He is the author of one book, What Was and Will Be (forthcoming from Resource Publications, which will be available on Amazon) and the chapbook Caught in Between (Desert Willow Press 2019). In 2014 he completed a 10-year section hike of the Appalachian Trail.