A portraiture of
heterochromia are
your rococo eyes.
Photo credit: Socrasal, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Allison’s Haiku
Tag Archives: Mary Washington College
“Orchard, Girl and Frost,” by Eric Robert Nolan
1.
You were seven and you rose before the sun.
Even then, the lightning that I love in you was present —
the fond and ardent current in your limbs
your manic-hot unique kinesis:
darting through a farm in Tennessee,
past the ordered orchard,
a piston-powered pixie,
an electric girl with raven hair.
Decades cannot dim this image,
nor physics as I see the past.
Lovers’ confabulations are strange, the way they bend all laws;
a beloved’s recollections shape to share,
and their stories dearest to us
grow so salient that
they arrange in our own remembrance.
You filed to a child’s chores —
collecting eggs for breakfast. I see
your purposeful sunup march; your little strides, their industry;
your ink-colored hair, drawn to an overhead bun;
your pressed pink lips – the morning’s labors had
absented their customary mischief,
doodled over your smile like
graffiti of a ribald rhyme.
The barn was enlarged in contrast with you —
at your elfin outline,
the great gray door grew vaster,
the inner beams and corners angled farther,
and the hay there whispered softer
for your footsteps at dawn.
A cacophony of fowl
indignant at your diligence
complained over your little hands,
gentle though they were,
gingerly loading the heated carrier.
Even here, at this young year, I see
your life’s indelible tenderness.
2.
Then, the reverse march,
again past the orchard.
The sun rose over the verdant rows, and the darkness fell like rain,
down and away, to trail in running shadows at their roots,
an aqueous dim
arriving at its strange and daily alteration,
made whole and soft and porous
to become the black soil.
All of the orchard’s birdsong
scored the course of your girlhood.
Its colors were the palette,
for sustenance in watercolor chroma
scented rustic air.
In rainbow, alternating
seasons of heavy fullness
were pears bearing the green of Eden;
round red apples, so crisp
that they crackled at the sweetened bite;
the flourishing, supple underfoot gems of strawberries;
ripe and oranging crabapples;
opaling peaches of the very same tincture
as your own Romanian cheeks.
Each of the ordered rows was
a phalanx of fragrance,
a linear, leaning clutch of sweetened air.
Bats were known to favor
the pears in particular — from the ripe green skin rose
their perfume of opulent sugars, as alluring
as the lotus that fascinated
the compulsions of Odysseus’ men.
3.
I see your surprise one morning —
Your jaw falling at an unexpected silver sunrise,
your fair face reflecting
the brightly lucent, winter-colored
hue of a rolling frost.
At clear and cooling night
the starlit, jealous heavens
had snatched all of their perfume back.
The warm air rose in their stygian fit
while layers of cooler gales
were made an encompassing brush
over the whole of the orchard —
rendered, then, to a chill and high,
glistening and nigh-acrylic whitesilver.
Along this abruptly colder
way to your labors, one day,
a sight surprised you,
like a single little chestnut
upon a fitted sheet.
It might have been a fallen plum —
the bat which met your mercy.
The rime had smothered over it.
The ivory ice had sheened to mean
its destitute demise.
You ran to help.
You always run to help.
The idyll of your life
is a history of sprinting.
I try to remind you, at times,
how your years’ trajectory
could be plotted by lives touched —
the lives that you’ve changed,
and, thus, how you’ve changed the world,
for they are all a part of it.
You darted along the rows
where every rich fruit
had kindled into argent,
where every wispy limb was weighted
in dooming translucence.
And you sprang to a newer labor.
Your little frame fell lower as you crouched
to cup the cold and beryl breast.
Where others would recoil
at your brown and leathery,
Gothic beneficiary,
your hands folded over its heart
and you raised it up from the frost.
You named him “Mordecai” and brought him home.
Though you felt your fingers sting with digging, you drew
your power,
your natural, warm, unique, redeeming
reverse of whitesilver.
I see and feel them all –
the pulsating heart,
the tiny ice crystals, the fine and matted
fur the color of mulberry,
your little cupped hands like porcelain,
the warmth,
the warmth I love in you,
present there, decades before we met.
4.
Allison,
You are seasons of heavy fullness.
You are the perfume over the orchard.
You are watercolor chroma under sun.
You are the hands that fold to warm in an unsparing frost,
when all is forsaken in whitesilver.
Observing the ordered rows of your days and your mercies,
I learn tenderness.
What cold will hold my roots will wane with season.
What sun will rise again will ease my limbs.
What darkness there may be in me will fall like rain
and then, in running shadow, drain
to become the black soil.
— Happy Birthday, Allison!
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2026
Photo credit: julian dobson / Restored Apple Orchard
Throwback Thursday: This McDonald’s Dollar Menu!
Ah, the halcyon days of yore — when the unhealthiest food you could eat was also the cheapest. (Nowadays, you’ve got to be fairly RICH to harden your arteries properly.) Another reason why the 1990’s were the goddam AWESOMEST decade.
I was a big fan of McDoubles back in the day. I’d buy five or six at a time, eat two, and throw the remainder into the fridge for later. Dollar-sundaes were kinda nice too.
Taco Bell was another fast food chain with some super-low prices. I remember rolling out of the dorm half-asleep on a Sunday morning, and riding along with another hungry student to the “Taco Hell” on Route 1 in Fredericksburg (just before Falmouth Bridge.)
Beef Meximelts were $1.50 a piece, if memory serves. And we don’t have those at ALL, today — they were discontinued!
It occurs to me only as I write this that this entire post is really just today’s version of our parents’ nostalgia in the 1980’s. (Do any other GenXers remember them talking about how candy and soda and double-feature matinee once cost … I dunno, a fifty cents or something?)
That 70’s Poet.
I passed a nice milestone yesterday — I’ve now seen my writing and photography appear in 70 ongoing periodicals (in addition to the anthologies and other standalone publications).
🙂
Horror Sleaze Trash
It’s the magazine named for me and my peer group — how could I NOT submit a poem?
Seriously, though, I am quite grateful to Editor in Chief Arthur Graham for publishing “Confession” in this superb and subversive art/lit zine “that will always be for the misfits.”
You can find the poem right here:
Throwback Thursday: the debut of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” 1986
That’s right — the legendary tome saw its 40th anniversary last month. (I’ve always had the habit of referring to its graphic novel format, but of course it was initially published as a four-issue limited series.)
Forty years — I can’t wrap my mind around that.
For a little perspective, imagine being a young person in 1986 and discovering The Dark Knight Returns for the first time. (I myself was introduced to it a few years down the line, but still.) Now picture an older comics fan in 1986 trying to interest you in a title that was published 40 years prior.
THAT COMIC WOULD HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN 1946 — a year after the conclusion of World War II. It would have to be a title like Tintin or the Mark Trail comic strip.
Damn, we’re old.
“A February Walk Short Poem,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Three score blackbirds alight a winter tree,
soundless on the leafless limbs in quiet company.
In lines of silent, sable flames, they ignite to spy
me with curiosity and six score eyes.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2026
Photo credit: Donald F. Mott, 2021
Nolan vs. The Bird Bullies!
Avian altercation! A chirpity-chirpity ruckus erupted at my fifth floor windowsill this morning … two sparrows were biting and plucking at a third. The aggressors had darker head coloring; the victim’s was lighter — I’m guessing this means it was either a female or a juvenile?
I tapped the glass pretty hard, and the bad birds took off. Then this beleaguered bird-twerp hung out for a minute and actually looked at me as if in acknowledgment. (Yeah, the picture quality is cruddy, but you can see the little fluff-nugget looking at me.)
I started searching my memory for a bird-themed superhero I could then proclaim myself to be … but both Marvel’s “Falcon” and Michael Keaton’s “Birdman” (2014) seemed fairly lame. My girlfriend, who is ever more cultured than I am, invoked Walt Whitman instead:
“I sound my barbaric ‘YAWP’ over the roofs of the world!!!”
“Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter”
It was a mad and spinning world in which you met her, but she was a mad and spinning girl — so brightly and resolutely burning that she herself was celestial. There was starshine bottled up in her heart, solar winds charged the particles of her thoughts, ions in the atmosphere ignited her impulses. Her willful joy was her own burning sun.
When she was sly, her eyes were hasty comets. Her passion amassed from Saturnal storms. Her smile was silver Jupiter– you wanted to repose over its white sands, beside the stained and rose-metal lakes of smoldering, darkening copper.
Between the spaces of her words, chasms of cosmos would occasionally open. You could stare into those depths for indifferent and measureless distances of light years — the sublime nightmare-nothingness that Providence had made, the Forever-of-Empty-Dark. But before you could be afraid, her own gravity drew you in.
And you were glad. That such loveliness could exist in a single soul was reassurance. (The Forever-of-Empty-Dark wasn’t entirely empty, after all.) And you were grateful — grateful for her rejoinders, for the taste of her mouth on your own, for her girlish laugh, for the way that she regularly lighted a murky Earth with the moonbeams of her quiet kindnesses.
She was unstoppable. Ultraviolet rode the coronal shades of her irises, and flared in her contemplation. She blazed. Magnetic radiation murmured in her poetry. You loved her for her uniqueness in a universe of cold space, for the way that she burned and turned and burned and turned without ever slowing or expiring. When her light fell across you, you could almost believe that you, too, were spinning and illuminated. You loved her enough for the illusion alone.
You loved her more for her gravity that drew you in and held you, and for her arms that did the same.
— “Her Smile Was Silver Jupiter,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Throwback Thursday: a Pre-gray Nolan.
This was … ten years ago, I believe.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 