Poems by Eric Chiles
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Bearly there
by Eric Chiles
From Canary Fall 2019
Rain from Eric’s roof drains into the Monocacy Creek, a tributary of Pennsylvania's Lehigh River, which drains into the Delaware.
From my perch in the tree
I see a pile of scat near the foot
of my ladder. Then I notice my
trail camera isn't on its stump,
and I wonder if the crap is some
kind of calling card.
When I get tired of sitting,
I get down and find the camera
half buried in the leaves
near the stump and another
brown clump of fresh scat
full of masticated acorn husks,
and I begin to suspect a large
omnivore is trying to tell
me something.
Sure enough, when I check
the camera's SD card in
the laptop, there's a frame
at midnight of a shiny snout
sniffing the lens, then another
of black serrated by white,
a teardrop of drool followed
by nothing until morning
when the camera captures
the grasping mouth
of my palm.
© Eric Chiles
From the Stag's Point of View
After Matthew Thorburn's poem and
Gerhard Richter's painting "Stag"
by Eric Chiles
From Canary Summer 2022
Uncharacteristically careless
now I sense you see me –
shadows that we normally are
to each other – through the wood's
protective web of branches, saplings,
brambles twined and laced as arboreal
armor for my survival and
your confusion, one hunting
a way through this labyrinth
whose twists are as instinctive
to me as puzzling to you who
have lost your senses in ordering
nature to less chaotic geometry
forgetting what nose and ear
find in the wind, not recognizing
how scent and motion betray
keeping me alive and you lost –
until this revelation.
© Eric Chiles
Grayling
by Eric Chiles
From Canary Fall 2019
Where the paved road stops
and the gravel starts,
the Denali Highway crosses
the Tangle River
ripping across the empty tundra,
an open vein over the rolling, brushy
skin of this alpine
valley stretching forever
through the vastness
of the snow-draped Alaska Range.
The only things that seem to move
are the water and the wind.
In a land of caribou and grizzly,
all we see as we walk to the Tangle
are clouds of mosquitoes.
But arctic grayling thrive
in the Tangle's swift
amber as we wade over
its slippery, mossy stones
with our fly rods.
Small ripples break the surface
by the far bank
where clots of grayling feed
on flies floating by
like a riparian buffet.
So, I tie on an elk hair caddis
and cast that way,
lifting my rod tip when one
rises to take the fly
then slices the water with the line.
I unhook it in my net, unfurl
its sail-like dorsal
with my thumb, marvel that the Tangle
hides such a silvery corpuscle,
feel the tundra's wriggling pulse.
© Eric Chiles