Care to hear the convoluted worldview of a pathological poet? Then be sure to stop by this site’s My musings page. I promise you that my random ravings are truly infused with strangeness. (Or you get your money back.)
Tag Archives: Mary Washington College
“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.”
Throwback Thursday: Mary Washington College’s “Campus … Drive?” (1981)
The photo below ought to give pause to anyone who went to Mary Washington College when I did in the early 1990’s. That is indeed Campus Walk back when it was Campus Drive, a legitimate roadway for the Town of Fredericksburg.
I have no idea when it was closed to automobile traffic and the walkway was created. The photo dates from 1981. (I am using it here with permission from UMW Special Collections; it comes from the Simpson Library’s Centennial photo database.)
It’s weird though. Campus Walk was a focal point of college life, especially its social aspects. It was where you said hello to a lot of your friends and exchanged news and plans, in the days before the internet and cell phones. And it gave the small campus an isolated feel that was kind of cool.
I’d heard about it being a road when I was a student, though. I worked at The Rising Sun Tavern museum downtown, and a couple of the other tour guides were women who had graduated from Mary Wash in the 1980’s. They had some vivid memories of young men from town (and Marines from Quantico) hollering at them as they drove through. I can see how that might have occasionally gotten awkward.
Publication Notice: “school shooter” to appear in the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018.
I’m quite happy to share here today that a poem of mine will be featured in the Peeking Cat Anthology 2018. Its title is “school shooter,” and it appeared here at the blog back in May. This will be the fifth time my creative work has been published in an anthology.
Thank you, Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine Editor Sam Rose, for selecting the piece for inclusion. The Peeking Cat Anthologies are always beautifully put together, and I’m honored to see my work appear alongside so many talented contributors from around the world.
The anthology is scheduled for release in October. I’ll post ordering information when it becomes available.
I hope you all are enjoying a wonderful holiday weekend!
“Graybeard the Pirate”
I have to say I think it’s weird
there’s salt and pepper in my beard.
And so today I’d like to scold
my melanin for getting old.
Quick site update.
Hey, gang. This site’s web address is now “ericrobertnolan.com.”
I’m not sure if this will affect anyone who might have the old address bookmarked, so I thought I would let you know. (I know you can’t bear to go without my unique brand of online nerdery.) 😉
My annual summer mountain poem.
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.
(c) Eric Robert Nolan 2017
Mill Mountain in Roanoke, Virginia, July 2018 (3)
More mountain madness with the Mary Washington College kids.
I DO realize that those blurry car shots are weird. I just find them trippy and dreamlike! I’ll probably never stop posting them. (And that third really blurry shot makes me think of Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game.” The bright, laterally-racing greens just give it a sense of urgency.)
Care to hear some superb and haunting poetry? (Audio selections from Dennis Villelmi’s “Fretensis”)
I am honored today to share with you three recordings of me reading from Dennis Villelmi’s Fretensis: In the Image of a Blind God. The Bees Are Dead has graciously published the readings over at its website; you can find them right here.
Thank you, Dennis, for allowing me to interpret your outstanding poetic work.
Paul Anka is coming to Mary Washington College.
That means the ladies and gentleman of 90’s-era New Hall need to return to Dodd Auditorium for at least one of his performances and discreetly riff him afterward — in the same manner as the MST3K episode, “Girls Town.” It’s a moral imperative.
I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned “Girls Town” here at the blog before. It’s one of the show’s best.
“I did it my way.”
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 