Eric Robert Nolan- A Poem

Industrial Revolution

 

1.

Did Leonardo Da Vinci 

Endlessly dream of machines?

Not his own baroque creations, those 

Wood and wire winged artworks 

That hung over his study:

Alate and ordered, latticed contraptions,

Each a suspended symmetry,

Gargoyles in geometry.

Did he dream of machines to come?

I picture him up late,

Poring over his own illustrations first, then

Ushered into Euclidean sleep 

By soothing mathematics -- 

The soft and ordered blossoms of

His own woodwork designs

Were flower-petal angles in his brain.

Could he, asleep, have foreseen

The assembly line, Ford’s

Ant-like Model T production?

Did he have an artist’s abhorrence 

For its linear, dull, and utilitarian order?

Was it a nightmare for him?

2.

How did farmers feel

In the Industrial Revolution?

Staid agrarian men, their disapproving eyes 

On the newfangled factories

Lining the horizon.

A rising scent of sulfur announces an age --

The new ripe stink

Of an advancing century.

The lined and coal colored fortresses, 

Of an impregnable era.

Were castles for the Barons

In a new, feudal America  --

Only burning – their smoke

Seeding a virgin sky

Up from the wide black loins and the lined, cracked skin

Of a newly darkened Earth.

Did they resent or marvel at

The New Century’s soot Aesthetic – 

The black castles of iron?

A lined and ordered Hell -- 

Souls among the smokestacks,

And bellies full of conflagrations?

To the later observers of old photographs,

The blackening symmetry 

At ninety-degree angles might

Resemble the rise of circuits.

Can you imagine farmers

Having prescient dreams?

What would one have thought, all tucked under

A homespun quilt at dark

Resenting advancing fortunes?

Might even one, once, in his antipathy

Have predicted, asleep,

The microchip’s square face?

I know no etymology

For the word, “Revolution.”

Is its root “revolt?”

To rise up against?

Or “revolve,” as in a circle?

“Revolve” as in “return?”

3.

Could Edison or Tesla

Have envisioned television – its great glass eye

Like Homer’s Cyclops,

Dull and full of vulgar visions,

Its mood made capricious

With changing channels?

We ought to pluck it out, or, at least,

Turn away at dinner.

We should cling to the books of our childhoods

Like the bellies of great sheep.

But we are not as sly

As Odysseus.

4.

During the old Cold War

In my 1980’s childhood

My father said he believed

Machines could prevent The End.

The Communist Revolution,

The Bolshevik revolt,

Had made its rising Bear

America’s enemy, in

A Nuclear Exchange, but Reagan

Marshaled forth our own machines in greater numbers.

I feared them  --

The ICBM’s  -- 

As a boy I imagined them

Rising in the sky in perfect symmetry

To make the new, black backcloth

Of the Atomic Age.

At the age of 13

I wrote a poem describing 

Their blossoming explosions.

In my childhood dreams

Their interlocking contrails

Looked like lattice work

Or angled flower petals.

In nightmares they are prescient

The warheads already know

The name of every child turned to soot.

My father, however, envisioned

Devices on all our wrists

Connecting us all – we’d know

That distant Russian farmers

Were no Politburo.

Finally realizing

That we were all the same

We’d be reluctant to push 

The Button.

Before the 90’s advent

Of The Internet

Was this a kind of prescience?

My father was a poet too.  

Today, in his absence,

After I write this

I’ll share it with Eugene, my friend,

In Russia.

5.

My mother’s best machine

Is a tablet on her lap

Looking ironically like

Half the Christian commandments.

She asks me how I am.  I lie.

In my heart, I am a farmer

Tucked under a quilt.

Circuits rise in the East;  

In the West, 

Missiles rise and arc at dusk.

My own machine

(with which I write this now)

Is full of distant visions:

The new and chic and sinful interests -- 

Zooey Deschanel and Richard Dawkins,

The New Girl and the erudite Briton,

Lust and apostasy in Windows.

Someday will there be

Prescient machines?

(Now, about the present, they’re omniscient.)

My favorite TV program

Shows monotheistic machines,

And an embittered robot 

Has a nuclear suitcase.

The hunted warn one another,

“The Cylons look like us now.”

Elsewhere, seen

By my machine

An internet flame war

Turns NUCLEAR.

A nationalistic ugliness ensues

Stoked along the coals of the global circuitry.

My screen is the glass face 

Of a monster hurling stones.

Maybe this, instead, is Homer’s Cyclops.

My laptop “hibernates”

When left alone too long

Once I imagined it dreaming

Of a better owner.

So unlike Da Vinci’s,

The asymmetric gargoyle

Of our own uncertain future

Hangs over our heads.  

With a Sword of Damocles.

Its lopsided face

And lack of proper geometry

Is still our own design.

6.

I’m almost 41 and miss the girl I love.

She had a Revolution -- rising in her cheeks

Flush red when 

I tickled her tummy in public

That time in Virginia Beach.

Hailing from The South, we’d joke

She was a “farmer’s daughter.”

In her last words to me, she said

She couldn’t know the future.

(She isn’t prescient, after all.)

“A lot needs to happen.”

And now I need to be

Industrious.

When people ask me what I dream

I say that I do not.

Besides, I’d rather not.

Not when the red flush rises yet again in her high white cheeks

Like twin sudden gardens full of roses.

And I endlessly dream of machines.

I dream that I am one.

My face is the same, except

A bright-hot piston heart

Replaces soft aorta,

Hardened steel instead of red tissue,

And my mind

Is a reliable hard drive

Holding balanced equations.

This would be easier.

I want a world of heuristics.

Algorithms instead

Of red flush memories.

I want a Revolution.

I want the world to change.

If I see my Love again,

I will hold flowers

And angle in for a kiss.

“My heart is a machine now,” I’ll tell her.

I’ll brightly peel back

The soft, pale imperfect flesh and say,

“I’m stronger.  Look, I’ve changed.

“Look at my heart.  Look.

“See the steel here.  

“Feel these steel angles, these veins are now only

“Piano-wire lattice work,

“Taut and tightly strung.

“Feel how the hardened symmetry

“Forms a perfect circuit.

“My heart is a bird-machine –

“It has Da Vinci’s wings.

“My heart is a latticed contraption.

“My heart for you is NUCLEAR.

“My heart is a prescient machine that sees our future.”

“My heart beats

“Its new and hardened life

“At angles.”

Her fingertips will be as soft

As flower petals.

I want a Revolution.

I want the world to change.

But if I meet my Love again

Will her eyes return to me?  

Revolt?

Or turn away?

[Dedicated to Robert J. Nolan]

© Eric Robert Nolan 2013

BIO:

Eric Robert Nolan graduated from Mary Washington College in 1994 with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology.   As an investigative journalist, his work has appeared on the front pages of The Culpeper Star-Exponent, The Free Lance – Star and The Daily Progress in the Virginia.  Eric’s poetry and short stories have been published by Dagda Publishing, Illumen, Every Day Poets, Every Day Fiction, Dead Beats Literary Blog, Dead Snakes, The Bright Light Café, The International War Veterans’ Poetry Archive, and elsewhere.    His first novel, a horror- science fiction story entitled “The Dogs Don’t Bark In Brooklyn Any More,” will be published by Dagda Publishing on November 19th.