I’m honored to share here that some nice person in the Spillwords Press community has nominated me for “Author of the Month” for November 2023. Spillwords Press has of course published a number of my poems — most recently they featured my short poem, “Blue.”
If you would like to vote for me, you may do so right here.
Voting takes place from now to November 29th. (Please note that you would need to register and log in if you wish to vote.)
Thanks! 🙂
I’ve been published in Ireland for the second time! I am absolutely honored that The Galway Review today published my new love poem, “The Beach House, Early Spring.”
You can find the poem right here.
The editors also elected to list my poem as one of the journal’s Best of the Month for October 2023.
The Galway Review is the city’s leading literary magazine, boasting more than a half million online readers worldwide.
I am quite grateful to Managing Editor Ndrek Gjini and The Galway Review Board of Editors for allowing me to see my work appear in such a distinguished periodical.
“The Beach House, Early Spring,” by Eric Robert Nolan
1.
For a moment,
we are outside of Time.
The long shore road before us,
graying in a wraith of fog,
is immemorial slate,
the fog the same fathomless iron
as the primeval cloak which once
crowned and veiled a world of only oceans.
We arrive “off season.”
The houses around the one that we’ve selected
hold only unlit windows.
Oblivious in their square and bare-roomed silences,
they are hewn at angles from a sandy landscape —
monoliths of dark apertures.
We invade our own.
You glow along the curve of the walk
like a slowly circling star.
A key rattles and we
explore the rooms in succession.
We are interlopers,
newly inhabiting each,
announced in electric light.
Your laughter enchants them
back to their habit of residence.
“Look at the size of it!” you yell,
tossing your pocket’s contents
upon the kitchen counter.
There your coins arrange —
planets in an accidental cosmos.
The gulf of the parlor yawns.
The sofas are motionless hills.
The hall is a valley lined with the caverns of rooms.
The kitchen is vast.
The kitchen is a vast canyon where dust has settled.
Only an old clock is in motion –
the slowly rolling, backlit iron
of its hour hand, its minute hand
in its indifferent face;
giddy with our sense of space,
we do not slow to notice it.
The fracture in the sliding glass door at the rear
is the fissure of an opaque glacier.
Together we draw the door
to greet to roar of our purpose, for
we wanted to see the sea.
2.
It bellows over all the dark dunes —
booming in pendulum rhythm
under immeasurable night.
But I only pull you to me.
For me, there is more allure
where ambrosial strands will greet your skin in graceful eddies —
the waves of your hair down your neck.
Even at this vastness of sea and sky,
the implacable, sheer and unending
Glower of Creation, I favor
your warming skin so longingly that
the Infinite would rear and roar in envy.
We rush out,
to salt and sweeping winds,
heedless under heedless stars,
to the dun high dunes like heaps of cretaceous remains,
then, through the shadow-burnished breach
in their slumbering dim ellipses,
to the paradox of every beach —
the sand’s coarse silicon still
softens all our darkened steps to silence.
Here Existence shouts
the very Bark of Providence.
The sea is a flat dimension
of slowly rolling, moonlit, coldly undulating irons,
lashing shore in endless duel,
and throbbing, epochal pulse.
Between stars of an unrivaled
hardness and brightness,
we discern within the black
one color poured to another,
blue which fills with voids of driving violet,
and the moon’s own rounded border,
burning gold on silver-opal circle.
I pull you to me.
We spill across the sand as eagerly as surf.
You are the very lighted moon upon my skin.
The heat in you is undiluted stars.
All of space recedes in salience beside
the fragrance of the space behind your ear.
And your breath’s accelerando
is greater than the cadence of tide.
We are alone.
We are as rhythmic as the unseeing
and boundless and indifferent sea.
3.
We escape the notice of stars as easily
as we laze to delineate them –
lying on our backs, the backcloth
of galaxies flush in front of us.
We are white and linking figures on the shore:
you are a lucent pearl, and I
a dim, wan shard of jagged, broken shell.
The pearl of you is shorn to sheen
by the pressures of your depths.
And I remember my life before you
as a conch will remember the ocean floor–
caliginous illusive dream.
My body finds your own again.
My thumb draws in to trace
your concave, shining oyster shell
of starlit open palm.
The contour of your wrist, in light,
is lustered spiral cerith under moon —
in shadow, is tawn of junonia.
I tell you the ocean is paradox –
fixed and ever moving …
or remorseless memory
by confabulation changed.
Caressing the warmth of your palm, I tell you,
the ocean is a clock.
The collisions of its tides
are our common metronome.
Kissing my inner wrist, you opine
the ocean is a poet —
ever keeping meter. And
you giggle that it never stops.
We pause.
Then we sit, in colloquy,
cross-legged, unobserved
under glittering galaxies in
incomprehensible distances.
And I ask you whether we matter.
Time is endless,
exceeding even circumference of
its slow and sliding clock of circling stars:
the North Star is its center;
the arms of constellations are
its hour hands, its minute hands;
the arcs of stars advance it, stars
number our moments together,
so slowly that we won’t notice,
unless we dwell to examine
their ponderous momentum.
I say more.
This time it’s physics.
I worry over a kind of
special relativity —
when time speeds up when we’re together, our
sated, stationary closeness, is it
our ardor dilating time?
In our glad adjacency,
lovers’ lives will therefore contract;
all of our moments are shrinking.
If so, then, Love, I give you
all of my dwindling moments.
I give you
all of my rapiding hours,
my blithe pilgrimage for your white form,
my quickening existence in this
salt and starlit air, with these
smooth stones and sounds of ebbing water —
the receding endless melee of sea —
this stillness and sensation,
this coast where sky reels faster now.
4.
I sleep. In dream, the tide
is embryonic rhythm.
I wake, and the moon is in a different place –
higher over us, its shimmering eye in chaperone,
or intent upon its mirror – the shine in the sand —
the eased and willowy silver of you,
your luminous integer.
You tell me, “You went away,
for a little while.”
I ask you how long but you only
point to the movement of moon.
Sleepily, I ask you if
the universe is so large that no god could ever
pity the infinitesimal.
The math of it leaves us abandoned.
We are each diminishing concepts
when the light years reach ever farther
in our abstract contemplations –
those cold and compassless lengths in space.
And no god could ever love us any more
than you and I could pause in our keenness to love
two random grains of sand upon this beach.
I measure the stars.
I confide in you that at times
I imagine them all empty.
In my mind I will search them all
finding neither mother, nor father,
nor friends and other poets fallen silent.
Like a child, I am learning only now
how to love a universe
that even in my reverie is soulless.
You pull me to you.
You draw your alabaster palm
to the roughening coral of my cheek.
Your arms are whitened driftwood.
Your legs are lettered olive shells.
And your eyes are as full and smooth and dark
as umber, nearly weightless sea glass.
You draw my face to yours,
and press your hand to mine.
You kiss me, and whisper solipsism:
that the universe is only us —
our perceptions.
We need only to close our eyes
to extinguish it all, on our own, in an instant, and then
reverse the extinction by blinking
them open again.
And if we shut our eyes together, our hands pressed, you tell me,
then we are all there is in Time and Space.
No distances exist between our palms —
only the actions of atoms,
and their electrons in hastening orbit,
excited at greater temperature,
moving faster in their warmed adjacency, as we are.
“Ask yourself if that is all there is, and it will be.”
My eyes are closed, but I can feel you smiling.
The tide reduces to silence,
as a slowing iron clock now winding down,
and the warmth of your open palm is enough
to soften all the universe.
I want to hold you, hold this moment,
outside of time, forever, outside
of the vastness pressing down us,
as we warm one another, adjacent,
lest eons align to suffuse our skin
or endlessness slide through our irises,
lest the Vacuum arrange in our veins,
or distances invade our bones.
My heart is neither calm nor song,
nor tender look, nor mildness,
nor summer, nor stillness
nor ode’s serene device.
For you – the hushed and stormless all of you –
my heart is a hungry universe.
My heart is the same vast,
unknowing insatiety
that with measureless abandon
reels when you distract from it.
And I will love you, Dear,
not only here,
not only until the end of my days;
I will love you past all that which is.
I will love you
outside of Time.
© Eric Robert Nolan 2023
Photo credit: Christian Ferrer, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
The August 2023 issue of Down in Dirt Magazine just dropped (Volume #210), including my short poem, “Nothing.” The theme of this issue is “At the Zoo.”
You can purchase a copy of Volume #210 right here at Amazon.
Or, you can read the entire issue online for free. My piece can be found right here.
Thanks once again to Editor Janet Kuypers for permitting me to showcase my work in such an outstanding literary magazine!
A really nice alumna of mine supplied a few more pictures of the destruction of Alvey Hall, after I posted about it yesterday. (Thanks again, Shelby!)
As I mentioned then, the Mary Washington College dorm was actually torn down in 2021.
This is it, folks. This is the greatest movie of all time. It’s better than “Blade Runner” (1982), better than John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), better than “Aliens” (1986). And those movies were all … perfect. (Man the 1980’s really were a golden age for pop culture, weren’t they?)
I was eight years old when I saw this in the theater, and I thereafter was a bit of an Indiana Jones cultist. It wasn’t just the action figures and board games and comic book and posters and role-playing games. I actually resolved to become an archeologist (or a paleontologist), and I thought the best way that I could prepare for that as a third grader was to gain experience “in the field.”
So I would lead my friends on “digs” or “expeditions” in the forests around my neighborhood. We would often arbitrarily pick a spot in the middle of nowhere and then just dig there, with a shovels we borrowed from my family’s garage. We were hoping to find … anything of interest, I guess :buried treasure, dinosaur bones, Indian arrowheads, whatever. (We never did. About the only thing we “discovered” was that tree roots are a real bitch when you’re trying to dig a hole.) I even kept maps and journals of our “adventures.” These are the kinds of things that boys do before they discover girls.
I tried to look the part, too. I had a brown cowboy hat that I hoped could pass for a fedora, an (empty) binocular case and a prop bullwhip snagged from a Levi’s jeans display at the local mall. My older brother called me “Idaho Bones” because I essentially was a cheap, skinny knockoff of the character I wanted to emulate. I hated it at the time, but as an adult, I kinda can’t dispute his assessment.
Oh, well. We all had fun. Every other boy in the neighborhood who spotted that bullwhip wanted to try it, so there’s that.
To this day, “Raiders” is still my favorite movie ever.
By the way, I am linking below to the Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers Youtube channel.
You
are
fully
a quarter of all seasons, and time, for all of every autumn gathers up in you.
Your
fair
face
is made from clear Septembers.
Your eyes are every October.
Novembers are your crown —
leaves ignite there — in the darkening harvest brushfire of your hair.
Let
Time
keep
weighted winter; diffident spring; sudoric summer.
Rather, fall across me,
rouse me to sensation,
stir me and touch me
as a cooling wind with scent of smoke.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2023
Illustration: “Autumn,” Alfons Mucha, 1896
“Bill and I,” by Eric Robert Nolan (flash fiction)
“That cat ate my wedding band.”
Big Bill studied the moving black flame of the accused as it tiptoed nimbly across the fence separating the alley beside McCarthy’s Bar from the alley beside Baxter’s Furniture. I love the way cats look when they climb. Their feet lead them lithely and certainly over high surfaces – like the flimsy rampart of that green picket fence. Cats will flicker along their improbable paths as weightlessly as fire itself.
“That cat did nothing of the kind, Bill.” That was my job – talking sense into him. You take a summer job as a busboy at an Irish bar in Queens, you wind up with unexpected responsibilities.
I’d been assigned as Bill’s chaperone on my first night, by Clay, the weeknight bartender: “Tell ya what, Mr. Psychology Major – if you’re so smart, you can keep Big Bill out of trouble when he goes to take a leak in the alley. Whenever he goes out, you make sure he gets back in.” The guys at the bar guffawed, so I gathered that this was some onerous task.
But it wasn’t. Bill liked to be listened to. Most people are like that. We’d chatted about his late wife. I’d asked him why they called him “Big Bill” (he was of average size), and he laughed amiably back at me that he didn’t know either. I made sure he zipped up when he was finished urinating, and I made sure he didn’t drop his keys or his wallet.
“Everything okay?” Clay gaped upon our first return. The guys at the bar looked like they were waiting for the punchline of an excellent recurring inside joke.
“Fine.” I started wiping down the tables again.
“No crazy stories? No craziness at all?”
“None. Sure, he’s drunk. Just be polite to him and he’s fine.”
Clay regarded me with disappointment, black and keen. He placed his palms flatly on the bar and pitched forward. The light reflecting on his bald head made it glint like the head of a torpedo.
“Okay, Mr. Psychology Major. If you’re so smart, figure ME out.”
But everything was not okay tonight – not when Big Bill saw that cat.
“I’m TELLIN” you – it ate my wedding band!” His watery eyes fixed on it with real injury in them, and with what looked like genuine recognition. His trembling right hand clutched the nest of silver curls that sprawled in disorder upon his head. The grief upon his features was as heavy as the palpable scent of alcohol that released with his every breath.
“Cats don’t even do that, Bill. C’mon.” That was correct, wasn’t it? Only dogs were stupid enough to swallow things that they shouldn’t. When I was nine, my dog swallowed the head of my G.I. Joe Desert Warfare Specialist action figure … also a good-sized rock one day, too, for some damned reason. Duffy just bolted it, when I was walking him, right out of the blue. He fell upon it as though it were a Milk-Bone.
“This one DID,” Bill insisted, “just this MORNING. Stole into my house through my bedroom window, swallowed my wedding band and ran right back out.” I realized now that he was close to tears. He began to shake. And his eyes would not move from that pitch-black cat on its silent walk.
Its svelte and winding flame paused not a moment.
“Bill?”
“WHAT, damn you?!”
“Look at your left hand … your wedding band is right there. You’re wearing it.”
His gaze finally fell away from the cat to chase desperately across his hand. There, on the pale flesh with the liver spots, was the wedding band, thick and gold and shining, like a bright-faced sentinel among the faded palisades of his trembling fingers.
Bill snapped his fingers and pointed at me, smiling like newly fortunate gambler. “You’re right, boy!” he chirped happily, as though I had just expertly answered some riddle asked of both of us. “The mind plays tricks!” He spun precariously on one drunken heel and marched back into McCarthy’s Bar.
I remained there, pondering what I’d seen.
The attraction of alcohol’s chemical magic is this – it’s usually predictable. A man knows how it will make him feel, most of the time; otherwise, he wouldn’t drink it. A man can drink to feel strong or brave, and he can find just such resolve, halfway into his third gin-and-tonic. He can drink to forget – driven on his a glass-bottle ship to the very same island of forgetting that eased Odysseus’ sailors. He can drink to make the women around him more lovely or charming – the more that he drinks, the more their common features will subtly arrange to arouse him, the more their middling words will startle his rapport.
But had tonight’s drink instead made Big Bill psychotic?
Or had I just witnessed dementia – or even a schizophrenic episode?
Life is a crapshoot. You can wind up being the guy who hallucinates in the alley beside a bar. Or you can wind up being the guy who looks after him. Neither is an especially happy existence, but one is clearly better than the other. What bothers me is this – it doesn’t really matter how good a person you are. You can wind up either man, regardless of the life you lead.
None of this mattered to the cat. It was a slim and spiraling, fluid onyx shadow, substanceless and out of reach. It was as noiseless as smoke. It was as indifferent as the darkness that falls over all the world, and all of us, when the day ends. To its own golden eyes, Bill and I probably looked about the same.
I wish that I could envision my feet leading me lithely and certainly over high surfaces – flickering along an improbable path, as weightlessly as fire itself. But I can’t.
“Eric!” bellowed a voice from the bar. It was time to go back in.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2023
Photo credit: Graham Crumb/Imagicity.com, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Empty are her open palms. Oblivion
rises in her irises.
All her inaudible words
are whispers now in storms of empty space.
Her recollection
is a chaos of absences.
Even her hair is empty sky, black and shining both, unreachable beside me, the unattainable stars, cascading night.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2023
Photo credit: Sarah Marie Jones, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, “Female nude portrait (cropped” [Further cropped by Eric Robert Nolan with creator’s permission via Wikimedia Commons]
Hey, gang. If you’re concerned for my sanity and want to monitor my mental health via the safety of your Internet connection, I’ve started a page here at the blog for poetry publications in 2023.
I hope that you are all having a happy Valentine’s Day!
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 