This isn’t the best reading of a poem, but I had fun last Fall when I recorded it. I’m not sure why I sound like Christopher Walken at the start of the piece: “He WATCHED with all his organs of concern …”
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
“All Our Faults Are Fallen Leaves,” by Eric Robert Nolan
“All Our Faults Are Fallen Leaves”
Again an annual angled auburn hand
announces advancing Autumn —
fingers aflame, the first Fallen leaf,
As slow in its descent, and as red,
as flailing Lucifer.
Hell in our sylvan vision
begins with a single spark.
The sting of the prior winter
subsided in July,
eroded at August.
Now, as at every September,
let new and cooler winds
fan a temperate flame.
May this nascent season only
bring brick-tinted perdition
and carmine Abaddon.
Where flames should burn, may there be
only rose tones on wide wine canvasses,
tormentless florid scarlets,
griefs eased in garnet trees.
What I hold in my heart to be true
is Edict at every Autumn:
Magentas may not make
forgetful a distracted God,
unless we ourselves forget
or burn to overlook.
Auden told us “One Evening”
to “Stand, stand at the window,”
and that we would love our neighbor,
but he didn’t counsel at all
about how we should smolder there.
Outside my window, and yours,
if the Conflagration itself
acquits us all by claiming only
the trees upon the hill,
the Commonwealth a hearth,
Virginia an Inferno,
Then you and I
should burn in our hearts to absolve
ourselves and one another,
standing before the glass,
our curtains catching,
our beds combusting,
our bureaus each a pyre.
Take my hand, my friend, and smile,
there on the scorching floor,
beneath the searing ceiling and
beside the blackening mirror
that troubles us no longer,
for, about it, Auden was wrong.
God’s wrathful eye
will find you and I
incandescent. The damned
are yet consigned to kindness.
All our faults are Fallen leaves.
Forgive where God will not.
Out of our purgatory
of injury’s daily indifference,
let our Lake of Fire
be but blush squadrons of oaks,
cerise seas of cedar, fed
running ruby by sycamore rivers,
their shores reassured
by calm copper sequoias,
all their banks ablaze
in yellowing eucalyptus.
Let the demons we hold
harden into bark
holding up Inferno.
All their hands are branches now;
all their palms are burning.
There, then, softly burning, you and I,
may our Autumn find
judgmentless russets,
vermilion for our sins,
dahlia forgiveness,
a red for every error,
every man a love,
every love infernal,
and friends where devils would reign.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2015
— Author’s note: the poem to which I’ve responded above, with its images of standing at the window and the mirror, is W. H. Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
I should bill you for these jokes.
Pal: “These ducks deliberately walked in front of my car and refused to move. They stared me down even when I drove up really close and honked, whereupon they SHOOK THEIR HEADS at me. I finally had to back up and go around. ‘Humiliated by ducks’ is not really how I saw the day going.”
Me: “Sounds like you were the victim of some pretty fowl harassment. And that one bird facing you looks like he has zero ducks to give.”
Throwback Thursday: The ABC 4:30 movie in New York!
Here’s another very obscure Throwback Thursday post about broadcast television in the New York metropolitan area — this was the intro the ABC 4:30 movie. People commenting here at its Youtube entry remember it from the 1970’s … I thought I remembered it from the very early 1980’s as well. But I could be mistaken.
One commenter said that, as a young child, he thought that the image of the spinning camera-man looked like “a mechanical frog monster.” I thought that as a kid too!
I would like to see my creative work get a little more grounded.
I still realize that my habit of photographing the ground at my feet will seem weird to a lot of people. But sometimes the patterns that you can find there are interesting — especially when confined within the contours of a viewfinder.
Besides, half the fun is finding battle environments where I would have loved to deploy my “G.I. Joes” when I was nine. Oh, to be a boy again.
Why do YOU think my closet stinks?
(And bear in mind I did my laundry a day ago.)
1) Yesterday’s wet socks.
2) I dropped candy in there? Can candy go bad?
3) Surreptitious raccoon habitat.
4) The existential decay from all my dead dreams.
5) Because Mark Zuckerberg is monetizing this somehow.
6) Dragons.
7) I unknowingly share it with an invisible gangrened lumberjack.
8) Tucker Carlson’s dead goddam soul.
9) THERE IS NO CLOSET. (The Matrix has me.)
10) Polonium.
11) The ghost of a wet dog that died in a fit of depression long, long ago.
12) The writers for “The Walking Dead” stashed their latest script in there.
This one I’m rather proud of.
And obviously it’s undergone some cropping and filtering. It might just make a nice book jacket.
A skink is a skink, I think, I think.
And no one can capture a skink, I think …
(Trust me. I tried. I’m not above scampering around on the sidewalk like an excited eight-year-old when I spot one of these glittery things. New Yorkers, skinks are fast. They’re the little blue-tailed cheetahs of the lizard world.)
“In brightest day, in blackest night …”
… no evil shall escape my sight!
Let those who worship evil’s might
beware my power–Green Lantern’s light!”
Pictured is one flippin’ AWESOME 40th birthday present!! (And thank you again to the amazing pal who got it for me.) To quote Guy Gardner, “I could kick ol’ Goldface’s butt with this!” (C’mon … you all know I am Hal Jordan guy and not a … Guy guy.” Even if that Ice was always a lot cuter than Carol Ferris.)
46th. It was my 46th birthday. No matter how many times I type that, I’ll never get used to it.
Throwback Thursday: WOR-TV Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie” intro!
This will probably be a pretty obscure Throwback Thursday post, but the segment below should be recognized by people who grew up in the New York metropolitan area in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. It’s none other than the intro for WOR-TV Channel 9’s “Million Dollar Movie.” (That music you hear is a particularly brassy rendition of Max Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme” from 1939’s “Gone With the Wind.”)
If you were in the New York area at that time, it ought to bring back memories of the old days of broadcast television. (It’s actually surprising how much nostalgia people online report at seeing this 44-second clip. And it’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.) A few commenters note sardonically that the clip makes Manhattan look like a nighttime paradise — while The Big Apple in the 1970’s was not always an easy place to be. (The city if far cleaner and safer today.)
Some of the comments I read were befuddling. There is one blogger who wrote that he remembers this intro from as far back as the 1950’s. (Had they really used it for more than two decades?) And a populous minority of commenters remember being unsettled by the clip. (They describe it as ominous, and the music as creepy, which mystifies the rest of us who remember “Million Dollar Movie.”)
This intro had an indelible effect on me. While it recalls monster movies like “King Kong” (1939) and “Godzilla” (1954) for a lot of others, it will always remind me of my father watching war films and cowboy movies on his days off — along with the occasional Charles Bronson flick. “The Great Escape” (1963), “A Bridge Too Far” (1977) and “Shane” (1953) all spring to mind.
When I was in the first or second grade, I habitually enhanced my Dad’s enjoyment of the “Million Dollar Movie” by peppering him endlessly with questions about whatever was playing — even if I had only wandered into the room for a few minutes. “Why did they call it ‘a bridge too far?'” “Why did they fight World War II?” “The British and French were good guys in the war, right?” “Why did the cowboy drop his gun on purpose?” “Why did the guy fake his death?” (Bear in mind, folks, this was broadcast television — long before the days of Netflix and DVD’s.)
If any kid did that to me when I was watching my favorite movies, I’d go nuts — even if I had a pause button. My father was a saint.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 