This happens from time to time. I’ll be out walking, and I’ll inexplicably return covered with these — which is weird, because I don’t remember brushing up against any plants.
They get into my bed, and they’re actually sharp — creating the very real danger of injury to my unmentionables.
I was especially honored to see one of my recordings featured at today’s launch of the Peeking Cat Anthology 2017. The poem I’m reading is “Roanoke Summer Midnight,” the same that was selected for the annual collection.
The video is below. There are five poets featured reading their work; I am the fifth. Mine is maybe a little harder to hear than the others, although it seems perfectly audible over headphones. (My recording equipment here at home is truly rudimentary.)
I believe this is the first time I’d recorded myself reading my own work. I hope that you enjoy it, along with the excellent other poets performing here.
If you are inclined to peruse some of the year’s best indie lit, you can find a link to ordering information here. (The anthology is available in hardcover and softcover, as well as in Kindle format.) Be sure to check out my poem, “Roanoke Summer Midnight,” as well as poetry, prose, art and photography from 70 other contributors.
Editor Samantha Rose was also kind enough to interview me; you can find that right here.
Thanks, Sam, for the opportunity to see my work featured in this terrific independent literature anthology!
No Freudians need respond.
I took this video a year ago today. It seems like another age. So much has happened between then and now. It’s feels surreal how our perceptions of time can be so subjective.
This was one hell of storm. Summer thunderstorms in Southwest Virginia seem absolutely commonplace. It is an extraordinary experience watching them roll in over the mountains, each of them a rapid fog ragnarok — and then moving on just as swiftly.
I don’t think I’ve seen a storm around Roanoke yet that can match the wet armageddon below, though.
This is a shot of me and my alum Dave at the site of the “Lost Colony of Roanoke” during Spring Break 1994. A bunch of the seniors at Mary Washington College’s New Hall trekked down to North Carolina’s Outer Banks that year; this is one of the places we stopped along the way.
Dear God, that was one of the most enjoyable trips of my life.
What the hell were Dave and I doing below? Performing a skit? I can’t remember. I was a really, really weird kid, and Dave was also pretty out there.
This is a terrible picture, but … you see those tall, dark shapes ascending from the high, bare branches like grotesque, upright fruit? Those would be buzzards.
Or … turkey vultures. To be honest, I don’t know if there is any difference between turkey vultures and buzzards. I’m from New York.
“Roanoke Summer Midnight”
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,
and drawing up their downy legs at last to final sleep.
Where the Shenandoahs’ driving
beryl falls to black,
ultramarine 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
Photo credit: By Jessie Eastland (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
If you look closely at the third photo, you can see a helicopter beginning an ascent from the top of Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Evidently, the facility’s landing pad is at the top of its cylindrical section. It kept landing and returning the day I took this photo; I’m guessing that a pilot was either training or practicing.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 