The Woods Ahead (For Luna Corvus)

By Cole Kinney
5 August 2008

The wood-spiked biker bar in Stigler, its jukebox dead, its waitress
                     Asleep at the corner table, none else but the stale ale: 
                     beer gone bad long before its imbibers had. 

But there sat Luna, bottle barely hidden
                   beneath the frayed poncho; some old brandy with no name. 
                   "Shine," he'd say with a grin, and I never knew if he meant 
                              a verb or a noun.

Years later, I finally figured it out. Neither, of course. 
               But by then he'd moved on to Arkansas, "scoutin' the woods ahead for
               Yankees," as he put it, with that same old grin: 
                           "Dead or alive."
               
The last time was Red Oak. "Meet me at the old graveyard there," 
               he'd whispered on the phone, "and bring the Big Black Book." 
               The latter for what he called "Johnseventeenreadin," 
                                 for his kin buried there. 
               "Important to say hidy," and I reckon it was, 
                                for Luna himself
               Was but half ghost, moving through the mossy stones, preaching
               To his dead kinfolk: "And that they also may be one, even as I am
               One with the Father." Which he was, now that I think on it. 


Of his words, with their maddening truth hammering always, 
                what could one say? 
                They came and went with a ferocity 
                befitting what he called a "Yankee-killer." 

Lean as Luna himself, little arrows aiming
               at the heart of all things "of this world and none other. 
                      None other."

I look back now and know how little I knew back then. 
                "Time is not the teacher," he'd always say, 
                           "grief is." 

But let no one ever grieve for Luna, wherever he might be. 
                 "My grief is God's and good enough."
           

About the Author

Cole Kinney was born in the Appalachians, in Talking Rock, Georgia, along Carter’s Lake. He attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he earned his Master of Fine Arts and PhD in Philosophy.

He is best known for his seminal The Logic of Anonymity: The Yankee and John 17, as well as his work in ceramics and statuary. Several of his classically themed angelic statues adorn the South, though their anonymity remains intact.

At an early age, Mr Kinney began studying the life of the Fire Eater, Roger Atkinson Pryor, and he eventually published Pryor Knowledge: The Life of Roger Atkinson Pryor, Fire Eater, which became the standard on the subject.

Mr Kinney currently resides in Unknown, Georgia, with his wife, Unknown, and their three children, Unknown, Unknown 2, and Unknown 3.