Poems Niederngasse Mark Nicklels

Mark Nickels

Spell The Fourth

I shudder to think what happens around here when all the people are gone at night. There’s the mahogany balustrade just sitting there. The corridors go on and on, mirrored at the far end. This spell is related to the sensation one gets when one is almost finished writing something under a deadline, or threading a needle, or soldering a motherboard. It sadly commenced in the last moments of a man working in a caisson under the river. It was only an instant, before the kaleidoscope in his mind froze and remained fixed forever. A variant happens when entering a meadow in a vast, flat country, clouds leaning over you. If often activates the instant someone leaves the room and you imagine the scene just after the pant leg or shoe disappears around the corner. Dust motes. Little echoes of movement in his glass of licorice tea. But there is an unbearable tenderness to nurseries, where faces we’d rather not see in the first place are too modest to appear in the window once we have left. They might appear if there is a pie there, cooling on the sill. But the last pie left cooling on a sill was a long time ago and was in itself not worth remembering. I remember hearing you whistle something sweet and mysterious in a large room in a cloister. There was an eternal Saturday feeling, a journey feeling. You smiled through your fatigue and thought of hemlock, music stands, rakes and psalteries. This was the day we began noticing ears of different sorts on people, and once beginning this it is perilously hard to stop. No one said, what are you looking at, but they came close, and might have said something had we worn even one item in teal. We didn’t really eat open faced sandwiches when I was growing up. Imagine eating a Janus faced sandwich. I wouldn’t want to eat a po faced sandwich. And the moment I said this, the spell was broken, and these sensations would never bother you again. It always happens when someone says something never once said before. Believe me; these things are kept track of.

Spell the Fourth is from a collection, almost finished, called The Grimoire, begun in early '06. The idea came from a recently rediscovered piece, written long ago, in about 1991. None of that text appears in the new work; only the concept remains. While these poems pay only the most casual lip service to the conventions of spells, they speculate…if only by being so labled... on the conceivable agency of a poem, where that agency begins and ends. It suits me to think that they are a sort of groping, in their loopy way, to an ever-receding unified theory of everything.