Three Poems by Eric Robert Nolan

 

school shooter

 

Grendel's mother wanted murder; but we all knew that,
you knew that just by looking at her:
the green and odorous skin like dark olive parchment over her cheeks' low bones,
the blackening teeth where the stale blood caked
and dried in her receding gumlines
like burgundy ink on her molars and incisors,
and a blackening-scarlet
stain on her canines.

Remember when we first saw her --
her flaccid breasts like flour-sacks,
her womanhood a stagnant moss,
the cadaverous, driving
lime of her hips,
her labia in livid lines
of bitter water lilies?

Remember the rising, putrid moon of her --
her green, sour form arching over ours in her ascent,
burning up from the green lake, a gangrene flame from the brackish water,
her profane grin adorning her,
and algae tracing her lips?

Remember the wet weeds
trailing the viridian strait of her throat
like silt-laden necklaces,
and all the mud and water rolling off her knuckles?
The spoiled laurel of her sinewed shoulders,
her outspread arms and their
parody of embrace?
Remember her mocking our own mothers?
Her derisive voice was like
the crack of splitting emeralds, asking,
"Am I so strange to young eyes?"

Remember the boiling fat on her tongue and
her victims' burning skin there?
The scalps she held in her upturned palms
were like watery garments.
Her talons were as black
as snapping-turtle shells.
We all knew at once that we were quarry.

Remember her
sorrel-coloured cataracts?
Her eyes were as green seas
boiling under Ragnarok.
Remember their ruptured capillaries
like collapsing red galaxies?
Remember her very irises bleeding?

But what if evil appeared
not as the face of Grendel's mother,
but, rather, the ordinary boy in her maw --
as unexotic and as common
as we are?
If we were boys and girls again
and bored in English class --
maybe at Beowulf's strangeness,
or maybe the strangeness of Jung --
and he were next to us,
with neither green skin
nor blood along his molars,
if he wanted murder, could we tell?
His face was as a clock's face -- prosaic and round.
Neither silt nor sinew lined his frame.
His gaze did not depict a grisly cosmos;
no galaxies had hemorrhaged in his eyes.
Would the difference be perceptible there
between wanting to kill time
and wanting to kill ten?
Would we know that we were quarry?

Tonight we'd like to believe
that the young are strange to old eyes
for any resemblance would kill us,
as Medusa's own face was fatal
to her upon the shield.
As adults, we understand
that Beowulf is only fable --
but that Jung's reservoir
is a fatal green lake.
Better an Idis than likeness --
if a monster looks like us, it stands to reason
that maybe he could BE us,
we'd nag in our primordial minds.
It might make us envision
a kind of reverse baptism:
our own plain faces
cresting the flat, green waters
to glide across the lake,
but bearing the eyes of strangers,
emerald and seething,
irises bleeding,
crushed green reeds in our jaws, like captive verses ...

And we could not suffer the thought.
Better to be quarry, or be drowned.
We'd know that, and so
we would run mad, we would run weeping, we would run forward and ravening to the green, forgiving lake,

where we could sink like Beowulf,
and our silenced lungs would fill with water.


            (May 19th, 2018)

[First published in Peeking Cat Anthology 2018]

 

This Windy Morning

 

The gales cry,
their sounds rise,
so strangely like
the wailing of children.
The gales
have ripped a rift in purgatory.

Along the low hill's haze
and indistinct palette of greys,
the thinning slate shapes
are either columns of rain,
or a quorum of waifish wraiths.

Condemned but inculpable
are those little figures --
long ago natives maybe -- in an ironic,
insufficient sacrament:
this obscuring rain's
parody of baptism.

If that faultless chorus
should never see heaven,
they will ever be wind without end
their lamentations ever
shrill within rare
arriving spring downpours.
Always will the squall
imprison their calls.

You and I should refrain
any temptation to breach
these palisades of rain --
lest we be greeted by each
iron-coloured countenance:
the sorrowing slim nickel
of an infant's visage,
little boys' greying faces,
the silvering eyes of the girls.

 

[First published in Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine, 2018]

The Rough Violet Stone

 

Life is too short for accord.
Bestow to me, please,
the heretic’s hectic direction,
the rapt and the agitated
compulsions of the outcast.
For if he walks long enough alone
the pariah’s heart will ever ignite to fervid purpose
like fire discovered by an exiled progenitor.

Grant to me the ardent discernment of the lost
— the faith that winding roads will one day
straighten on one white and burning noon
and then impel their feet to the platinum
Zerzura, Oasis of Lost Doves,
where they’ll arrive, spellbound but knowing
only those unwelcome elsewhere may enter,
here where gleaming lions’ heads will crown the gilded gates,
frozen in their fanged artifice and
roaring, always, forever,

where a desert city carved from precious stone
assails the sky in spectrum with
the upward uncut gems of its varying edifice.
Towers of jade will lacerate
heaven like sharks’ teeth.
Emitted are the scents of sedition:
the perfume of banned books,
ceremonial roses burning,
horses perspiring, the smelting, sweltering
tined iron bouquet of beaten swords in forges.

Ares’ simulacra will shine in arid air.
In the garnet churches
topaz holds apostate altars.
A vagrant king commissions walls of diamond
marvelling at its
bladed opulence, arrowlike against his palms.
What once was black and common coal,
was crushed by the weight of the world
into geometry, into clarity and hardness and light, symmetry and speartips,
for all the sharpest angles are made
only from lines that have changed their direction,
like dissident travellers at crossroads.

At an amethyst wall,
its purple-bauble hue derived
from equal measures blood and sky,
you meet the Hero’s countenance.
you answer his gaze, but the rough, violet stone
marshals forth only your face from its plum and murky recesses,
staring back out of amethyst is your own reflected face, alone and
roaring, always, forever.

[First published in Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine, 2021]

 

Eric Robert Nolan’s writing has appeared throughout over 50 publications in 10 countries: the United States, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Romania, Turkey, India, Singapore and Australia. His work was also selected for 16 anthologies, two chapbooks and six mini-books. He was nominated for the Sundress Publications 2018 Best of the Net Anthology, and for Spillwords Press Awards in 2020, 2021 and 2022. His debut novel was The Dogs Don’t Bark in Brooklyn Any More, published in 2013 by Dagda Publishing in the United Kingdom. He is a past editor for the dystopian literature journal, The Bees Are Dead. He was entered in 2022 into the national Poets & Writers Directory.