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The Great Eastern

from Mid​-​Atlantic Ruins by Chris Kiehne

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And then I traveled towards the town where I was born,
just outside of Baltimore,
toward my mother and my father and my sisters and their dogs.
An autumnal country,
every seventeen years fell upon by a great cicada swarm,
and I am its native son.
I am its son.

For several years I’d hunted through the northern corridors.
I left a trail of wrathful lovers in my wake.
But the time had come for me to quit that bacchanal and head back home,
to put my daggers in the ground and show my hands.

The phantoms where I’m from wander around the reservoir,
beneath which sleeps a flooded town.
Their once-lustrous eyes are gone as ashen as the belly of a moth.
A woman stalks the hills there,
robed in coursing swells of blood and waiting for her lovers arms,
but her wound reopen nightly and her lover never comes.

Dead lights dancing on the water.
Cloven hoofprints on the shore.
An awful clawing all amongst the fallen oak.
I walk these hidden places as I’ve walked them times before…

In Jackson Duke I lost more than a dear, devoted friend:
He was a shepherd and a saint.
My only earthly brother and a lionhearted prince.
In his final dusking hours he stood bravely at my side.
I kissed his muzzle and he smiled.
Then I lifted up his broken brindled body and I said goodbye.

And, now, on certain moonlit nights, a ghostly baying sweeps the forest,
And I can picture him and his joyful wolfen grin.
Rushing at the windswept grass, and snapping at the darkness.
I would give anything to run with him again.

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from Mid​-​Atlantic Ruins, released March 25, 2020

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Chris Kiehne Towson, Maryland

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