Michael Young on "Cicada"

In a poem entitled "Shells," Mark Nickels says, "I've been praying without knowing it." In this we catch an intimation of his poetry's incantatory power and synthesizing force. However, what we cannot guess from this quote is the massive grandeur that comes through even his shortest of poems. With a sweep like a Mahler symphony, it is hard to quote his work in brief, although, at times, his poems have beautifully quotable lines, such as, "The oranges are a refinement of everything the dirt knows."

The mystical undercurrent of his work comes to us under the peculiar banner of the confessional. Unlike other poets whose mystical explorations are distanced by scholarship or stylization, or are simply a cultural impulse, Nickels' interest is from natural affinity, which means from the most personal point of view. It is this fusion of a confessional voice with a natural mystical affinity that I find unique to his poetry. It is as if self-examination discovered the universal at its center. For instance, he opens the poem "Ludlow Café," with the line, "A voluptuary of unknowing, I huddle/in a vast wool coat." I can think of no other poet who conjures such an image; it's as if the anonymously written mystical text "The Cloud of Unknowing" had actually been authored by Oscar Wilde. A witty tack to take, but also quite profound.

Consequently, the speakers of Nickels' enchanting poems shift and change, as in his poem "Cicada" where the speaker, in one section, is in the present, and in another section, is in the year 1669 untying a woman's bodice. Or, time itself shifts as in "Astor Place Opera House Riot" or "Spiral Maneuver" where the poet tells us, . . . last Tuesday rhymes with the same day in 1124, because the moment is adjacent, contiguous to the other on a clear, winding helix of days.
Here we find another theme peculiar to Nickels-at least, peculiar for a modern poet-for in spite of his obvious fascination for the multiplicity of things, he does not share the modern faith in the fragmentary.

In "Waterfall Effect," he tells us, "A poem is a record of the way the world rhymes with itself."
Certainly in a world which the poet George Oppen called, "The shipwreck of the singular" we need to hear the message that, in fact, the world rhymes with itself, and we have a record of that rhyming in Nickels' poetry: musical, mystical and integral.

This is Over

"America is the oldest country in the world because it has been in the twentieth century
longer than anyone else."
Gertrude Stein
1
You took yourselves outside for photographs,
by curbs, on squares of grass, in the morning in
America, when planes were out. You saw only
the contrail, always the sun like snow, blurring
the pressed faces, the tail fins, the spares an O
on trunks of cars, antlers on the poles conducting
lightning speech. In August, you heard
summer insects, locusts. As you looked toward the t's,
the very tops aligned with houses, past the looming
cottonwood, over lilacs, fences, you thought
it was the sound of people talking, glowing nodes
pressed through a wire, insects the analogue,
in oblique wind, and thinning slanted light.

You have the measles, you are quarantined indoors.
You trace the metal numbers on the screen door.
Outside, in the concrete double-drive, your brother
casts a rod and reel, an arc into the dim end,
daylight savings. Your mother peels potatoes
at the sink, her lips shaping soundless words.
Your sister wanders home from junior high, for lunch.
She and her girlfriend watch Dick Van Dyke ,
a gray-white Tuesday, and eat on tv tables: tuna-fish,
potato chips. You try to get attention by tripping
on a hassock like Rob Petrie, wisecracking from the corner
of your mouth, like Morrie Amsterdam. Silence.
So you do jumping-jacks while standing in the closet,
rocking by your phonograph, its hot motor smell, in plastic.
You were singing Ferry Cross the Mersey,
Gerry and the Pacemakers. Also Dusty Springfield,
who sang Wishin’ And Hopin', your favorite song.
You had glass 78's: The Artist's Life,
Tales from the Vienna Woods. Barnacle Bill
the Sailor. Slap Her Down Again, Pa.
What is the method, this century?
I think it is a thing ground fine,
then spread and rolled, silver, sylvan,
silent, en grisaille, black haloed like
the sodium lights in early video,
punching holes in the coin-colored sky.
For most of history, when history was made,
so few showed up for any large event.
Now you crouch for shadow presentations
of the world, before a box with figures
in snub-nose pirouette, assassin finger puppets,
the big jet roaring home, black haloes
in the air around the lights, like whorls
of negativity, a chaos emblem,
a depthless eye to warn us, this
we should not penetrate, this holy
shroud of Now; don't rend the real,
this deep grimoire, bird-laced, rounded,
sunned. And then a funeral with the caissons,
horses. Drums. To go with the trumpets.
Backwards boots in stirrups. A young girl asks,
are they his boots?, stunned.
Nightly News. Chet Huntley is a dry man
smoking in the dark. He tells the booming,
flying land a story. And when he tells,
the rest areas fall silent, and pictures loom
above his shoulder. A cigarette plumes lazy
at his crooked elbone. Roll the credits,
with the molto vivace from Beethoven Nine,
whose sharp non-sequitur timpani thwacks
recall loopy genius, and splice us to history, Chet.
He leaves at night beneath a sloping hat,
and loping past the outdoor weatherman,
the fella with a marker and a tri-state map,
(a mix of sun and clouds) heads off to Lindy's,
for a scotch.
2
For the complicated, handsome sickly man,
a bread box with a flag around it.
We saw his head, that waved a flag of blood.
In autopsy photos, childhood loiters in his face.
His little boy salutes and squints, Oswald's stiff
hid underground, not a parapet to pole his head.
In five years, another brother, a fell year.
Two months prior, a great black King
lined out in a tufted coffin, dead,
and draped on the back cover of Look.
He rolled from behind the neighbor widow's garage,
the cover snapping open in the drive.
The kitchen window curtains pull aside,
all handlessly. I imagine this, and widows
everywhere, who in infinite, separate
living rooms, lurch in crepe, from winking
TV screens to pristine, folded beds.
Lay back with your shoes on, mother.

Your oldest brother had a girl with looming hair,
and while he drove, you sat between, a drive-in Saturday:
hardware, car wash, Wimpy's. You bumped her cigarette,
which made her nylons melt. And he, soon Air Force
classified in Bangkok, let you have it.
And figuratively then, he let them have it.
Then they let us have it. Then I let you have it.
It goes around.
3
What is the method? There were other methods.
There was mud, then stone, a little iron.
Woodland felled. Now unlike things are mixed
and ground and rolled. Materiality
is rendered first in vats. It never scents,
in any way, the trail of the sun.
Never a contour cut by time. And
there are no flaws. Our method of air
is transit. It is a material of transit. Our method
of water is no longer harness, but ubiquity.
It spirits away turds everywhere, and I mean
everywhere. You wouldn't believe
where we can do that! The method of ground
is ground, though there is a second ground,
a colony of the idea of ground,
an unmysterious lump, a myth gone to a dump, the moon.
I almost forgot we ever went, because,
and no one says it, it was dull, and not a little dull,
but fabulously so. We'll stay pent down here.
We touched goal is all. No money in it, either.
O my beautiful.
Oh my beautiful, again beautiful, some pitted china
pulled from a house fire's cooling nest,
a naked bed lit only by a streetlight, a face
the life has fled from. O my beautiful that was less,
there was soundless groaning that night in 1969
from three billion souls. Something
had gone out of it. That this is all it is,
our moon, less interesting than a desert,
less rich with surprise than an empty parking lot
in sodium light, a few millennia of fable
dashed by Neil and Buzz, athletes doing calisthenics
while you fitful sleep, or rise at four,
parched and padding to the fridge to gulp cold milk
straight from the bottle, leaning on the door
with a drastic local headache. Then,
passing through the living room, you see
the lost white wafer floating, hovering
in her stygian cricket-dark, alive
in dreaming only. You are unmaidened,
and will ever you be swan’d again or not
some distance underneath her,
your thin feet joined in the living black grass,
your thin feet painted with her, beautiful,
my beautiful, O my beautiful.
O my beauty. My dead moon.
4
Walking sidelong down the street
to present a smaller target to the world,
as though it made a difference. Which it doesn't.
She crawled backward on a car trunk for assistance
in a pink nubby weave suit. Not that you knew
what this was like, picnicking by trestles.
The lake-glass quivered slightly when your line
disturbed the water, and trees spired
upside down. Fields out to a tree line
of mixed hardwoods! A wizardly oak. A field of
arrowheads. A cemetery with iron stars akimbo,
last centuries dead mulching the earth,
unalterably virtuous, by virtue of their death.
You drove a little while, then parked and walked together
through the trees, and finally spread a blanket.
You covered her body with yours, awkwardly,
not even lustfully, and for an unknown reason,
under the watchful sky, under the tall trees,
fresh young hominids in a temperate forest,
Early Quaternary period, the Holocene Epoch.
Your girlfriend was distracted. Her soundless lips
formed words. You tripped over some roots
to get attention, faked a pratfall.
You wisecracked from the corner of your mouth
like Red Skelton.
Goodnight and God Bless.
Your life is a long strip of sky-colored film
framed with bare branches.
There, the two of you, who chase bright love
around in one another, pant together
in her bed. There you saw the two of you
from far above and from the side,
then from the other side, in rapid flashing.
Both your trains came in together, timely, timely,
but your ka, auteur, remained aloof,
stood by, some distance from the good thing.
5
Who cannot touch it.
In your house with central heating.
With your walls lined with some distant
fraction of world culture, listening to Delius,
some languid, lovely music of the swamp.
What's left of a fish is scuppered in oil
in a frying pan on the stove.
You who cannot touch it, eating a pear.
Who cannot touch it, which is grief.
Nothing, no salt in the eyes, a sigh that sounds
more bored than anything, a fantasy of houses
looming over swamps, on stilts. Solitude
among the mute and pendant leaves.
Long hammock days. You, enchanted
on the balcony, lank-haired, bearded,
frail, with a lap rug and some crackers,
reclining in a wicker chair. Beneath
the dead crusader cheekbones, death,
a sort of wildlife stalking in the lymph,
exotic and discreet. Who cannot touch it.
In the 13th century, a nun named Margery
of Kempe expressed humility before God
by incessant weeping.
But you are here, and grief approaches
from the street and up the drive. Some cars
sough by. She has a little hat with netting
hanging down, with small faux asters tangled
in the veil. Her scent is like cut flowers
and clean closets, cedar; faintly, photo chemicals,
official documents that bloom with mildew.
Her eyes blink on and off somehow,
some gradient of light behind gray irises
going through its changes; some nearly frozen birds
passing by a window, in February.
The brittle day is kindling. The tiny birds
strobe the room almost imperceptibly,
and a minor comet is thrown on the horizon,
its tail folded behind it, like a check mark
in a ledger, the morning sky the color
of an open mouth, an unlikely,
shredded looking place.
She crosses her legs. Her stockings
make a nylon whisper, and she smokes.
The smoke twines up. Some morning sparrows
commence the skirling that they do in cities,
the way they always did when you were dull-eyed,
enervated, sleepless.
But the room reddens, and rises, and glows.
The music swarms in greater tides,
ascending modulations, new lands unrolling
out from under one another to reveal
the silver brass frontier, threaded
with a golden, crawling river.
There is duration, more than change.
You don't know why. And then you say,
don't ask me why.

An Old New Life


This will be better, the life after the life,
in another time, among the essences.
He will sacrifice the analogues of fire,
the neon fires, blue cathode fires. Then
he'll know, not the smell of something burning,
but the agitated, firstborn fire itself.
Over any torn meadow, the sun revolves
to coax speared wheat with a measured word.
Iron will mimic bone, but no one will be fooled:
the marrow teaches without question.
A kiss will be a cloth that barely conceals,
spread over the face of her body.
It will mislay her grimness suddenly,
a smile beneath the folds. But this is now.
A wraith loiters by his spine in tired clothes,
envying the dead their finish, though avid
for more living. There is a daily tomb
of Tuesdays and Thursdays, delved in February's name,
a name too thin to feed on,
and in fluorescent fade-light, rayed from nowhere,
his living holds its breath, and waits for what has passed.


A Long and Swerving Conch

It's the surfaces romance me. When the salt trucks rain in the street, the cars roll over the unbroken pellets each with a hollow fricative, hailstones on a cathedral roof. Elsewhere, like a consort of viols inside, the morning wheezes somberly awake. A clean shirt I’m unfolding has a tearing sound I like, not adhering to itself. I am ready for what? To see more, it looks like, and, thankfully, though there’s no money in it- hear more. I notice the phenomenal world observes all the repeats. Are the workday combinations different from yesterday, or was I not paying attention? I was screening films in the frontal lobe, no doubt, about unfulfilled particulars. I noticed they’d only lose about thirty seats if they put an aisle down the middle. If not exactly rested, see how my black and loamy wedge of sleep just now digitally truncated, rhymes with the following: Schubert’s Unfinished in my north-lit room. This old seahorse and the Sonata d. 960: written by someone with inside information about their own mortality.

A French historian theorizes that up until a couple of hundred years ago people knew when they were going to die, days, months in advance, and prepared quietly for same. This skill has faded, a lovely green signal, dashboard-colored, no longer rising above the press of microwaves. Myself, I have noticed fewer and fewer deja –vu episodes as I’ve gotten older. The music is draped this morning in its brooding snow-cloud get-up, led by a conductor untimely killed in a crash. Note the overlays: my truncated sleep, the Unfinished, the young morto-conductor whose baton may still be heard. These overlays can become very fine, with attention. Every day, I tell you, like stepping up to the lip of a long and swerving conch, and going in. I am embedded in what I see the way the bird I heard when I opened my eyes just now was embedded in jet wheeze; a jet, a great winking abomination, but also a room with seated people in it. They are stretching, looking out at gothic Manhattan, a city with jongleurs but no wolves.
I read The Diary of Samuel Pepys on the subway, how he supp’d last night on boiled milk and a pullet, then stopped to get his periwig rehaired and dusted, a cone over his face like a wind-up fox. His domicile is a mess, he says, with cheese laying about, but life gets done. At that London instant, my old neighborhood, the one I grew up in Michigan, is still a rocking wood-lot where the poplars flip us their gleaming undersides with great tenderness, though there are brambles that can trip you.

I’ll take it, even if, as the Buddha says, it is impermanent, Not-Self, unsatisfactory. I’ll take it, sleepy, and with the feeling (which I won’t be deprived of) that it matters about as much as I think it does, and it’s my hand that makes the adjustment, cranking up or down the significance of the moment like Simon Bar Sinister.

And I’ve got to find a little danger somewhere, to leverage the relative safety of this life against three million years of running after cross and dangerous potential meals, the fear of having my skull staved in in my sleep, the sparkling marrow inside probed with sooty fingers while they hold me down. I remember that, I remember that and wake up screaming. I remember rhythmically trundling along that railroad handcar, too, (ah, the rhythm of love) escaping the police, opening and closing drawers in that deserted farmhouse, looking for things. It wasn’t me, but it was, and outside gongs shuddered in the wheat, bronzing everything.

Dreams are like bleeding radio waves from other people’s lives, a log-jam of whole, discrete instants, a vast pointillist canvas. And we never get over them, the others, and we are never alone. But people aside, conditions, the way things are, actuality-- all our fights about it (mostly with ourselves) have a certain rank poignancy, like rancid lavender, or backed-up crying, a smell like ammonia rearing in the sinus cavity, a billowing, x-ray shroud.

Perform this exercise. It is only Thursday, but imagine yourself away from the earth so long that when you finally get back and get in the door, and go through the mail, everything you hated while here is new again, and blameless. Your nose runs and your eyes tear, though it could be the wind. You are hungry, and not overly concerned. All the epochs of the spot you’re standing in surround you, right here, shuttling by, a book of days fanned close to your face. You breathe, your lungs as impersonal as the lowering stratocumulus, the bellows mechanism without patent anywhere. Your movements, and those of your friends, are plotted on the spine. This much is plain: one thing in this blurred schematic, so delicious, is not much larger or of greater duration than another, because it all transpires against a stillness unimaginably dense, an emptiness empty even of emptiness, and for our purposes, forever.