Rooftop Poetry Club - Perry S. Nicholas

Perry S. Nicholas

Bio:
Perry S. Nicholas is an English professor at Erie Community College North. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Buffalo. His first chapbook is entitled Stars That Cover You, and he has been published in the Buffalo News on five separate occasions. His poem “Father’s Toast” was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize by Skyline Magazines. He recently shared first prize in the Skyline Winter Poetry Contest for his poem “Comealong”.

Poems:

In a Past Life I Was a Soldier

In a past life I was a soldier,
icon to those who demanded strength
precisely when they ordered it, merciful
angel when they were chased down,
surrendering in torched fields:
a scientist stumbling through experiments
in love and guilt, a baker who never baked
anything new but always had his hands, face
full of flour and laughter.

In the past I played many roles, ate
razorblade candy of mother’s paranoia,
father’s sweet drunken resilience,
carried conflicts around in a dented cigar box
like an army of flailing action figures.

Sonnet to Those Who Dearly Need Me:

I suggest your desperate need remain
sequestered. It breathes heavily in dreams
and barely detaches its head from the pillow,
these quilted words all about you and how you
would never think to exploit any man, especially
one as selfless as me. I’ve doggedly returned
to school, a student of villainous sleep.

So it won’t be me who rescues your soul, here
or anywhere in this world you’ve imagined us.
I close your hand and apologetically release you
with palm and mind full of more obliging priests.
Swinging by one sliver of heart, I dangle
from the moon,
your reluctant superhero.

The Quilt

I read some gentle language,
the closing line of a poet’s
interview. It must have been
deep into night when he
was especially weary of words.

Who else would respond so,
like a husband softly draping
his mother’s hand-stitched quilt
over a drowsy wife as she curls nearby,
wrapped in the conversation?

Not the pain at the loss of anything,
not the hurt of holding something
and letting it slip, he spoke
with the fine ache of those unable
to sound words purely, assuredly,
though the words are willing enough.
She fell off into sleep, and he held
his breath as he covered her.

The interviewer pressed on:
It’s difficult to love.
And the tired poet exhaled:
To love is very difficult.

The Latin Teacher

He scratched and searched for a root,
a live one, personification or persimmons worked
the same for him, but it really didn’t matter—
it was the way he held the word as he screwed it
down into its small plot in the middle of a line.
He sang, a troubadour of wronged language,
drained down through the throats
of kings and poets, boys and heroes.

Shrouded in untranslatable print,
he was whored, hurried and hurdled over.
The stories made him out to be queer or ill,
and students sneered as he squatted proud
on his desk, regurgitated sounds, brought
them up in precise croaks from the dead.