Extracts From From the Poplars by Cecily Nicholson

The following are excerpts from From the Poplars, the latest book of poetry by Cecily Nicholson, which has recently arrived from the press (order yours today!). These excerpts also appear in the forthcoming publication, Poems by Sunday, a quarterly art and poetry magazine out of Brooklyn, New York, edited by Daniel Owen of Ugly Duckling Press. It is hand-typed and mimeographed by hand with a limited print run (and hence is not available online).


Poplar Island pop patri individuated alike

lazaretto
Kamau Taurua, North Brother,
Angel our current

worse conditions of confinement

subjects of capture
property in the strictest sense

bound in a given moment
called to ground

unitary in the midst scattered

breathing
this next while a kind of evolution

stratifying dialects
from a strict sense of words

formal markers for ship makers

soluble paper ever sad
phonetic social generations and forth


demonstration parcels bought and sold repeatedly
as the record shows stolen

light comes up over the southeast bridges

normative, quieted

that a place told you it was      bleeding into the snow

cold seeps to bone
born and cut with no language to remember

storage pits, caches, the hanging lots for crows

as land sounds lean into sleet
cottonwood trees

in the dark of winter growing tips “see” light
            causing seedlings to bend toward the source


whiles before people disposed in a hundred-dollar hospital
corporeal lessons lean toward shared logics and finer beats

      for the old lamps to show the whips still stuck
            after centuries in the old wounds

pages to an opposite shore

to earth beneath here

an “I” on pavement or other words over
centuries of rotting matter

so sanctuary monoglot accent
island passed back into non-standard

trees suffer catenary curves of ivy and gossamer
signal lines tremble

sway and song put to order; to archive under English cloak


listening horizons burst new density this time

an I wants to pull a part as well
      words light rain

romancing words      composed upon a bridge
                  in the smokeless air

from the sky bridge
in the golden dawn pouring over wakening condos

      o’r supplanted industry

routes you give in strings and I take as ligaments


called to the surface revolution a minimal surface

the most minimal surface other than the plane

a bloom
a smile curved up into sepals awn-like petals

past the parapet widening to the throat
lingual bone thumbed to spine

riparian causeway to ocean

audible integrity bending moments cable-stayed