February 13, 2011
the things of this world as a man passes a stick,
thinking it a wand, or a squeegee,
thinking it could clean or fundamentally alter
the composition of a thing
rather than simply and privately acknowledge its
puny
existence.
Yes, Travis Nichols passes his mind, his language, over the things of this world — “Let’s learn! / The bird is brown. / Its beak is hooked. / Its tail goes up. / Its body hops. / The bird is a wren. / It flies past my eyes. / I breathe in and out. / I write it down.”
The resulting poems present an affable self at times building entire psychedelic dreamscapes — “Behind my hand the white body bats its blue-veined wings, / prunes the sea-trees under a blue sky” — at other times being made small — “here where I am asleep on my sweatshirt / my face fills with lines. / Animated by a hand, / I am a small blue sock from Ohio.”
Nichols delights in sensuality while maintaining an awareness of the body’s limits—
It has been five centuries since our dream-girl
drowned
in the book, five thousand years since God
drowned the world, but only a few hours since you
dredged me from a dream
with only the sound of your breath.
Even side by side we are still separated,
our bodies surrounded, I think and sigh, but then
your eyes
unfold and wordlessly it seems we’ve had the same dream.
The casual stance of the New York School is present in these poems, fused with the Surrealist sense of the physical world’s malleable boundaries. —Open Books: A Poem Emporium, Seattle