Selected Work For Future Books
“When we get lucky, lyric poets initiate us into what the language and the speech of consciousness itself can sound like…Nobles lets us hear something of that sound.”
— Eamon Grennan
Slate Skies
Outside the tall house
The barbwire curls
The highest treetops billow
The satellites keep track
The small backyard
With a small anxious dog
A high-pitched suffering sound
No one else hears it
Shades drawn on all floors
One roof shingle loose
Pendulum in the mind
On its one rusty nail
Published in the Gettysburg Review
Photo by Procsilas Moscas — fragment of Flag by Jasper Johns, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
American Shaving
The beautiful and true
spreading of blood in water,
strands of it waving, surreally outward
like the red stripes of the American flag
fluttering on a Friday afternoon.
The sink’s porcelain is white.
And the music from the clock radio
set precariously above the sink
is the bent note why?
of the electrified blues.
Published in The Paris Review (selected by Charles Simic)
At the Tomb of the Acorn
The scraggly squirrel is my mentor.
He has fallen from the nest and scrambles
as best he can through the leaves with a limp.
His nose can still sniff, but his lax tail drags sadly behind.
I have mastered his acorn and hold it in my pocket with dexterity.
I am free to be myself without faith and have opened a small shop
at the corner of Fallen-from-Grace and Divine.
It is here in the leaves beneath his tree.
Penny ante and a small cough.
How often in movies do small coughs denote death?
The leaves are turning in the wind.
They flash sensations, secret memories.
But the most pressing memories
are gone, promises broken.
Having ruined the doll’s hair with neglect,
the child hauls it aloft with a string,
one minute hopping spastically in the grass,
the next riding slowly upward
to the window, where fingers
dangle and laughter falls.
Where shall we bury your acorn?
Its little hat is the memorial marker to remember life by.
You have taught me all I know, all that I thought I knew.
And you pocket my string for adventure.
You taught me how to fall from the nest, how to limp
into the soul of dry leaves to bring them to life.
From now until then, I will follow your every pause
to perfection. And after, when you are gone,
I will circle your tree forever faithful in search
of your acorn tomb, so that I too—like you—
can wear a little hat and start from scratch, scraping
as best I can through the leaves with a limp, straight for you.
Published in the Colorado Review
The Secret Life
“The Lonely Doll is the story of a doll named Edith mired in loneliness, seemingly parentless, eating cereal alone . . .” – Jean Nathan, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll
Nothing could keep us
from the loneliness,
from the love
of the aloneness
longing the loneliness
of The Lonely Doll.
We love your longing, Edith,
your heart sad, head bowed
against the window frame.
Not looking out, but longing. So far . . .
Nothing that a spanking couldn’t fix,
the panic burning in the air, jewelry
and makeup everywhere, filling the room
with its incense of tears, the burning
desire, a mark
of clear defiance.
But that’s your story, isn’t it, Edith?
And Little Bear’s offensive male bravado
did not help. (You hurt too much.)
But it did heighten
the moment. He quickly sensed
the intense seriousness
of loneliness, our loneliness,
forever and ever, alone
together
beyond the story’s end.
Published in The Gettysburg Review
The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright
Visions (Diptych)
In my mental or nervous fever or madness, I don’t know
quite what to say or how to name it…
— Van Gogh in letter to Gauguin
I.
Self-portrait with dark felt hat, with pipe,
with pipe and glass, with straw hat, with gray felt hat,
with straw hat and pipe, with Japanese print,
with gray felt hat, with straw hat, in front of easel,
with pipe and straw hat, with bandaged ear,
with bandaged ear and pipe, with cap, with cap.
II.
The vision after the sermon,
the yellow Christ, the green Christ,
Christ in the garden of olives, agony
in the garden. Where do we come from?
Where are we? Where are we going?
O Taiti (nevermore).
Published in The Colorado Review
Self-portrait with Felt Hat, 1886-87, by Van Gogh
Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), 1988, Paul Gauguin
Baudelaire, 1911, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon
Imagination: the Queen
of Truth. Everything else
doesn’t exist. It dies
in lust, lost in the sick soul
of the infinite.
From the poem The Baudelaire Lamp, published in Tin House