{"id":14252,"date":"2022-06-13T12:31:10","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T10:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=14252"},"modified":"2022-06-15T12:31:33","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T10:31:33","slug":"poems-by-eric-robert-nolan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=14252","title":{"rendered":"poems by Eric Robert Nolan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Industrial Revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n

dedicated to Robert J. Nolan<\/em><\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

Did Leonardo Da Vinci
\nEndlessly dream of machines?
\nNot his own baroque creations, those
\nWood and wire winged artworks
\nThat hung over his study:
\nAlate and ordered, latticed contraptions,
\nEach a suspended symmetry,
\nGargoyles in geometry.<\/p>\n

Did he dream of machines to come?
\nI picture him up late,
\nPoring over his own illustrations first, then
\nUshered into Euclidean sleep
\nBy soothing mathematics \u2014
\nThe soft and ordered blossoms of
\nHis own woodwork designs
\nWere flower-petal angles in his brain.<\/p>\n

Could he, asleep, have foreseen
\nThe assembly line, Ford\u2019s
\nAnt-like Model T production?
\nDid he have an artist\u2019s abhorrence
\nFor its linear, dull, and utilitarian order?
\nWas it a nightmare for him?<\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

How did farmers feel
\nIn the Industrial Revolution?
\nStaid agrarian men, their disapproving eyes
\nOn the newfangled factories
\nLining the horizon.<\/p>\n

A rising scent of sulfur announces an age \u2014
\nThe new ripe stink
\nOf an advancing century.<\/p>\n

The lined and coal colored fortresses,
\nOf an impregnable era.
\nWere castles for the Barons
\nIn a new, feudal America \u2014
\nOnly burning \u2013 their smoke
\nSeeding a virgin sky
\nUp from the wide black loins and the lined, cracked skin
\nOf a newly darkened Earth.
\nDid they resent or marvel at
\nThe New Century\u2019s soot Aesthetic \u2013
\nThe black castles of iron?
\nA lined and ordered Hell \u2014
\nSouls among the smokestacks,
\nAnd bellies full of conflagrations?<\/p>\n

To the later observers of old photographs,
\nThe blackening symmetry
\nAt ninety-degree angles might
\nResemble the rise of circuits.
\nCan you imagine farmers
\nHaving prescient dreams?
\nWhat would one have thought, all tucked under
\nA homespun quilt at dark
\nResenting advancing fortunes?
\nMight even one, once, in his antipathy
\nHave predicted, asleep,
\nThe microchip\u2019s square face?<\/p>\n

I know no etymology
\nFor the word, \u201cRevolution.\u201d
\nIs its root \u201crevolt?\u201d
\nTo rise up against?
\nOr \u201crevolve,\u201d as in a circle?
\n\u201cRevolve\u201d as in \u201creturn?\u201d<\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

Could Edison or Tesla
\nHave envisioned television \u2013 its great glass eye
\nLike Homer\u2019s Cyclops,
\nDull and full of vulgar visions,
\nIts mood made capricious
\nWith changing channels?<\/p>\n

We ought to pluck it out, or, at least,
\nTurn away at dinner.
\nWe should cling to the books of our childhoods
\nLike the bellies of great sheep.
\nBut we are not as sly
\nAs Odysseus.<\/p>\n

4.<\/p>\n

During the old Cold War
\nIn my 1980\u2019s childhood
\nMy father said he believed
\nMachines could prevent The End.<\/p>\n

The Communist Revolution,
\nThe Bolshevik revolt,
\nHad made its rising Bear
\nAmerica\u2019s enemy, in
\nA Nuclear Exchange, but Reagan
\nMarshaled forth our own machines in greater numbers.<\/p>\n

I feared them \u2014
\nThe ICBM\u2019s \u2014
\nAs a boy I imagined them
\nRising in the sky in perfect symmetry
\nTo make the new, black backcloth
\nOf the Atomic Age.<\/p>\n

At the age of 13
\nI wrote a poem describing
\nTheir blossoming explosions.
\nIn my childhood dreams
\nTheir interlocking contrails
\nLooked like lattice work
\nOr angled flower petals.
\nIn nightmares they are prescient
\nThe warheads already know
\nThe name of every child turned to soot.<\/p>\n

My father, however, envisioned
\nDevices on all our wrists
\nConnecting us all \u2013 we\u2019d know
\nThat distant Russian farmers
\nWere no Politburo.
\nFinally realizing
\nThat we were all the same
\nWe\u2019d be reluctant to push
\nThe Button.
\nBefore the 90\u2019s advent
\nOf The Internet
\nWas this a kind of prescience?
\nMy father was a poet too.
\nToday, in his absence,
\nAfter I write this
\nI\u2019ll share it with Eugene, my friend,
\nIn Russia.<\/p>\n

5.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s best machine
\nIs a tablet on her lap
\nLooking ironically like
\nHalf the Christian commandments.
\nShe asks me how I am.
\nI lie and say I\u2019m fine.
\nIn my heart, I am a farmer
\nTucked under a quilt.
\nCircuits rise in the East;
\nIn the West,
\nMissiles rise and arc at dusk.<\/p>\n

My own machine
\n(with which I write this now)
\nIs full of distant visions:
\nThe new and chic and sinful interests \u2014
\nZooey Deschanel and Richard Dawkins,
\nThe New Girl and the erudite Briton,
\nLust and apostasy in Windows.
\nSomeday will there be
\nPrescient machines?
\n(Now, about the present, they\u2019re omniscient.)<\/p>\n

My favorite TV program
\nShows monotheistic machines,
\nAnd an embittered robot
\nHas a nuclear suitcase.
\nThe hunted warn one another,
\n\u201cThe Cylons look like us now.\u201d
\nElsewhere, seen
\nBy my machine
\nAn internet flame war
\nTurns NUCLEAR.
\nA nationalistic ugliness ensues
\nStoked along the coals of the global circuitry.
\nMy screen is the glass face
\nOf a monster hurling stones.
\nMaybe this, instead, is Homer\u2019s Cyclops.<\/p>\n

My laptop \u201chibernates\u201d
\nWhen left alone too long
\nOnce I imagined it dreaming
\nOf a better owner.<\/p>\n

So unlike Da Vinci\u2019s,
\nThe asymmetric gargoyle
\nOf our own uncertain future
\nHangs over our heads
\nLike a Sword of Damocles.
\nIts lopsided face
\nAnd lack of proper geometry
\nIs still our own design.<\/p>\n

6.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m almost 41 and miss the girl I love.
\nShe had a Revolution \u2014 rising in her cheeks
\nFlush red when
\nI tickled her tummy in public
\nThat time in Virginia Beach.
\nHailing from The South, we\u2019d joke
\nShe was a \u201cfarmer\u2019s daughter.\u201d
\nIn her last words to me, she said
\nShe couldn\u2019t know the future.
\n(She isn\u2019t prescient, after all.)
\n\u201cA lot needs to happen.\u201d
\nAnd now I need to be
\nIndustrious.
\nWhen people ask me what I dream
\nI say that I do not.
\nBesides, I\u2019d rather not.
\nNot when the red flush rises yet again in her high white cheeks
\nLike twin sudden gardens full of roses.<\/p>\n

And I endlessly dream of machines.
\nI dream that I am one.
\nMy face is the same, except
\nA bright-hot piston heart
\nReplaces soft aorta,
\nHardened steel instead of red tissue,
\nAnd my mind
\nIs a reliable hard drive
\nHolding balanced equations.
\nThis would be easier.
\nI want a world of heuristics.
\nAlgorithms instead
\nOf red flush memories.<\/p>\n

I want a Revolution.
\nI want the world to change.
\nIf I see my Love again,
\nI will hold flowers
\nAnd angle in for a kiss.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy heart is a machine now,\u201d I\u2019ll tell her.
\nI\u2019ll brightly peel back
\nThe soft, pale imperfect flesh and say,
\n\u201cI\u2019m stronger. Look, I\u2019ve changed.
\n\u201cLook at my heart. Look.
\n\u201cSee the steel here.
\n\u201cFeel these steel angles, these veins are now only
\n\u201cPiano-wire lattice work,
\n\u201cTaut and tightly strung.
\n\u201cFeel how the hardened symmetry
\n\u201cForms a perfect circuit.
\n\u201cMy heart is a bird-machine \u2013
\n\u201cIt has Da Vinci\u2019s wings.
\n\u201cMy heart is a latticed contraption.
\n\u201cMy heart for you is NUCLEAR.
\n\u201cMy heart is a prescient machine that sees our future.\u201d
\n\u201cMy heart beats
\n\u201cIts new and hardened life
\n\u201cAt angles.\u201d
\nHer fingertips will be as soft
\nAs flower petals.<\/p>\n

I want a Revolution.
\nI want the world to change.
\nBut if I meet my Love again
\nWill her eyes return to me?
\nRevolt?
\nOr turn away?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ode<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I love the way you
\ndraw your lips, divine,
\nin your tilting smile.<\/p>\n

If I could only
\ndraw your lips, in lines,
\nthe portrait would beguile.<\/p>\n

Would that I could
\ndraw your lips, to mine.
\nDelight me for a while?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

school shooter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Grendel’s mother wanted murder; but we all knew that,
\nyou knew that just by looking at her:
\nthe green and odorous skin like dark olive parchment over her cheeks’ low bones,
\nthe blackening teeth where the stale blood caked
\nand dried in her receding gumlines
\nlike burgundy ink on her molars and incisors,
\nand a blackening-scarlet
\nstain on her canines.<\/p>\n

Remember when we first saw her —
\nher flaccid breasts like flour-sacks,
\nher womanhood a stagnant moss,
\nthe cadaverous, driving
\nlime of her hips,
\nher labia in livid lines
\nof bitter water lilies?<\/p>\n

Remember the rising, putrid moon of her —
\nher green, sour form arching over ours in her ascent,
\nburning up from the green lake, a gangrene flame from the brackish water,
\nher profane grin adorning her,
\nand algae tracing her lips?<\/p>\n

Remember the wet weeds
\ntrailing the viridian strait of her throat
\nlike silt-laden necklaces,
\nand all the mud and water rolling off her knuckles?
\nThe spoiled laurel of her sinewed shoulders,
\nher outspread arms and their
\nparody of embrace?
\nRemember her mocking our own mothers?
\nHer derisive voice was like
\nthe crack of splitting emeralds, asking,
\n“Am I so strange to young eyes?”<\/p>\n

Remember the boiling fat on her tongue and
\nher victims’ burning skin there?
\nThe scalps she held in her upturned palms
\nwere like watery garments.
\nHer talons were as black
\nas snapping-turtle shells.
\nWe all knew at once that we were quarry.<\/p>\n

Remember her
\nsorrel-colored cataracts?
\nHer eyes were as green seas
\nboiling under Ragnarok.
\nRemember their ruptured capillaries
\nlike collapsing red galaxies?
\nRemember her very irises bleeding?<\/p>\n

But what if evil appeared
\nnot as the face of Grendel’s mother,
\nbut, rather, the ordinary boy in her maw —
\nas unexotic and as common
\nas we are?
\nIf we were boys and girls again
\nand bored in English class —
\nmaybe at\u00a0Beowulf’s<\/em>\u00a0strangeness,
\nor maybe the strangeness of Jung —
\nand he were next to us,
\nwith neither green skin
\nnor blood along his molars,
\nif he wanted murder, could we tell?
\nHis face was as a clock’s face — prosaic and round.
\nNeither silt nor sinew lined his frame.
\nHis gaze did not depict a grisly cosmos;
\nno galaxies had hemorrhaged in his eyes.
\nWould the difference be perceptible there
\nbetween wanting to kill time
\nand wanting to kill ten?
\nWould we know that we were quarry?<\/p>\n

Tonight we’d like to believe
\nthat the young are strange to old eyes
\nfor any resemblance would kill us,
\nas Medusa’s own face was fatal
\nto her upon the shield.
\nAs adults, we understand
\nthat Beowulf is only fable —
\nbut that Jung’s\u00a0reservoir<\/em>
\nis a fatal green lake.
\nBetter an\u00a0Idis<\/em>\u00a0than likeness —
\nif a monster looks like us, it stands to reason
\nthat maybe he could BE us,<\/em>
\nwe’d nag in our primordial minds.
\nIt might make us envision
\na kind of reverse baptism:
\nour own plain faces
\ncresting the flat, green waters
\nto glide across the lake,
\nbut bearing the eyes of strangers,
\nemerald and seething,
\nirises bleeding,
\ncrushed green reeds in our jaws, like captive verses …<\/p>\n

And we could not suffer the thought.
\nBetter to be quarry, or be drowned.
\nWe’d know that, and so
\nwe would run mad, we would run weeping, we would run forward and ravening to the green, forgiving lake,<\/p>\n

where we could sink like Beowulf,
\nand our silenced lungs would fill with water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Industrial Revolution dedicated to Robert J. Nolan 1. Did Leonardo Da Vinci Endlessly dream of machines? Not his own baroque creations, those Wood and wire winged artworks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1566,77],"tags":[1567,1123,1575],"class_list":["post-14252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-72","category-english","tag-egophobia-72","tag-english","tag-eric-robert-nolan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-3HS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14253,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14252\/revisions\/14253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}