Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. He spent several years a news reporter and editorial writer for the Culpeper Star Exponent in Culpeper, Virginia. His work has also appeared on the front pages of numerous newspapers in Virginia, including The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress. Eric entered the field of philanthropy in 1996, as a grant writer for nonprofit healthcare organizations.
Eric’s poetry has been featured by Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dagda Publishing, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere. His poetry will also be published by Illumen Magazine in its Spring 2014 issue.
I’m not terribly happy with this reading — I had a cold at the time, and it certainly sounds like I rushed through it a bit. I still have fun with the poem, though.
That moon still sails past my window every night.
*****
“Roanoke Summer Midnight”
Its midnight moon is newly minted coin —
a white-hot silver obol
forged in burning phosphorus.
The crisping clouds around it blacken.
Its silhouetted mountains
are great blue gods at slumber
the faded-haze azure horizon’s
giants in the dim.
Those slopes have known a billion bones of hares
that raced upon them other midnights, then,
pausing, one by one,
drawing up their downy legs at last to final sleep.
Where the Shenandoahs’ driving
beryl falls to black,
aquamarine to onyx,
lay legions of hares — generations resting.
There are the hills where ivory
rabbits sleep among gods.
Ahead and under moonlight
the curving rural road obscures its end.
At right, an intersecting well-lit modern block
confuses the curling topography.
The fresh and symmetrical asphalt’s angle
mars the winding thoroughfare with order:
a ninety-degree anachronism.
That new and perfect subdivision
affronts the corner’s antebellum chimney,
broken down to stones and overrun in lavender
— its lilac colors driven plum by sunset.
That last century’s smokestack
was itself effrontery once
to the formless places where natives stayed
their only edifice the stars,
their only currency the blinding coin of moon.
Eyeing, then, the summits’ crowning cobalt
driving down in royal blue to coal,
I hope to one day take my rest
there, in the darkening indigo,
alongside giants,
among white rabbits in myriad easy stillness,
to pause myself at last and sleep beneath
what meadows stretch in cerulean dark,
where hares will race like moon-kissed silver,
or comets of darting pearl.
Church Avenue between the Circuit Court and the Texas Tavern. The impressive church that you see (this town has a lot of them) is Greene Memorial United Methodist Church.
DC Comics. Part of the “Batman: Year Two” storyline.
I keep thinking of Todd McFarlane as a 90’s phenomenon, because that was when I started reading comics. It’s weird seeing a cover by him that was published when I was in high school.
5th Street Overpass near the Virginia Museum of Transportation. Mill Mountain is in the background. If you look closely at the sixth photo, you can see what looks like a gutted fighter jet to the right of the two antiquated trains. I can only assume those are connected with the museum. (So, too, is the rusting hulk in the seventh.)
