Ryan Nowlin
TOPS AND BOTTLES
The tops of bottles in a Morandi painting
are perfectly pitched between acid green
and storefront blue. What you see translates
as glass, a zone of fruitful endeavor which
could run the gamut of long afternoons
only mildly inconvenienced by overcast skies
or a passer-by at dusk. I once valued an estate
for the stripes in its awning, each a subtly
different shade of brown. In the deep shadowed
crevices and the mysterious softness of Morandi’s
bottles, the personal self is regarded as the Mont Blanc
of Romanticism—recessional, multiple and open ended
like a wall-eyed luminosity inset in the wainscoting
of rooms, the newness of green otherwise so ordinary.
THE BROKEN MONUMENTS OF MY GREAT DESIRES
After Sir Walter Raleigh
A rain drop on the windowpane
maps out the dimensions of another
larger drop by simply touching it,
so do I create a larger narrative
of desire, without entering into it.
“I is neither he or she, but gender fluid”,
Spilled drops can’t be gathered into a bowl.
Escape PALES paled in comparison with staying put
at the Black light party, standing next to
a Baked Alaska made to look like an Alien
Ovomorph. The black light party evolves or
devolves as in a Robbe-Grillet mystery.
(I love that Robbe-Grillet. Ha!
Isn’t that the height of pretension?)
MESHES
Is Meshes of the Afternoon about a renewed
lease on life, amnesia or a film noir about a murder?
Very mysterious. What has no history lacks
interiority articulated as terror, moments of
gravity, the “language of cinema” or the motion
of a woman running up the stairs of a house.
The exposition of the film displays the lens
as a hooded timekeeper with a mirror for a face,
passages of time confined to Sunday morning.
The afternoon proceeds as a juncture of collapsed routes.
My clean-shaven face reflected in the shards of a mirror,
a quick study of eros spelled backwards.
Elsewhere in this noir, a man-eating beast roams
the city preying upon coffee house Kierkegaards
and ecstatically articulate bums. Often it feels
like I am filling a dead man’s shoes. I say twist
the knife and leave those pests crying crocodile tears.
I record the noise of a car speeding across
a bridge, a gunshot, a blow out and the crash
of the car into the canal below.
THE ODESSA STEPS AND ITS DESCENDANTS
Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions” on the steps,
a panicked crowd, gun fire and a runaway baby carriage
Just as pressed flowers mummified spring and summer
the Odessa Steps will outlive all our triumphs.
An oral history of our time, its ocular oo’s
looks very much like a pair of broken
glasses on the bloodied face of the woman.
We are outliers, disconnected from each other,
buying trinkets to give our lives significance,
our visages flattened and pressed into books.
The modernist sensibility is pain—the terrible object
or analysis of terror, death raised to the level
of sustained attention. Samuel Barber’s Adagio
for Strings and me staring at a half empty jar of Nutella.
Ryan Nowlin is the author of Time with the Season and Kugel. Publications have appeared in several magazines, including The Chicago Review and Posit. He received his MA in creative writing from Temple University and MLIS from Rutgers. He lives in New Jersey and teaches at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City.
