Cicada

Mark Nickels

Size/ Binding: 6 X 9; 112pp
ISBN: 1-892494-22-1 (paperback)-- $12.95
LCCN: 00-104014
Audience: Adult General. Includes a CD featuring Mark Nickels reading his selected poems. Download ebook samples: Adobe Acrobat / Rocket eBook / Microsoft Reader / Palm

"In most ways Cicada is an astounding book, nearly a new species of poetry. Often the poems poach gracefully in the territory of the novel. I was poignantly taken by the astute fluidity of the language, the facility of looking at ordinary things in a radical new way. This book should be widely read because it announces the arrival of a poet who has a good shot at being major."

-- Jim Harrison, Author of Legends of the Fall and The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems

"It's pretty obvious that (Nickels) has developed (his) own voice, which can take a while, the tumbling rhythms and adjectives. The music of Cicada is penetrating and distinct."

-- Evan S. Connell, Author of Son of the Morning Star and Notes Found in a Bottle on the Beach at Carmel

Read NYCBigCityLit review

Selection from Cicada

1

Even before the story begins, you endure
a hundred subtractions not accounted for
in this turning: a grimness coming down
that doesn’t answer to your name, and wayward
urgencies of memory that have you stupefied,
engrossed. I’m thinking you don’t know
how much. What do you know of it,
your spectral, green, small icehouse wound,
and under it, the wounds of others, owned
by a line of hominids with lips compressed,
concealing mossy teeth, and in the DNA,
a quiver of time defying ecstasies and ailments
gone underg round for thirteen generations,
like cicadas, only to surface in you?

No fewer, and I’m thinking you don’t know
how many, there are obscure enchantments
knotted in your nerves. Atavistic old religions
shoal at night, in choirs, in silent tides,
on highways driving after dark, cornball
music on the radio fading in and out,
mile markers signaling.
Your passengers asleep, you wouldn’t tell
them anyway, how the willow, the willow
in the margin of the road, closes
its eyes, in its winter branches feels
the glamour of the sea, and whatnot.
Now, these drooping trees possess you
with sensations you call love.

But as a wavering kid, both you and I
were scared of willows. I saw you running
only halfway down a neighbor’s drive
because a giant willow loomed there,
whispering, distracting, a restless cover.

Listen to more poems at drunkenboat.com

This Kindled by Gaude Virgo Salutata, a Motet by John Dunstable, c. 1400

Slow-spreading English music, as though
we watched a pale drawing-off of the night
from delicate fields, and heard a haunt
of griffins in a fog close by the house.
How one of the griffins, without fire, has wrought,
by a concentration of time, a face in gnarled elm wood
with a spell hidden in its hands: to warp, to whorl the wood,
to make water freeze and thaw and unvisibly fade,
to make fire ash, to make fire even without fire,
and carve an eddy in the air that turns his maneuver
into a major wind...kissing the barn-wood high up,
overfilling the air over the ocean,
causing a wrinkle in the salt-drift, engendering thunder.
How a griffin loves with his hands the way
we walk without shoes after winter,
painfully, for the first time in a year.
But after all this is spoken of, it is the tenderness
I haven't stolen for this poem: the griffins
droning after the rain, touching the wood
to make a face in the bole of a tree, another hybrid,
one being falling into someone else.