from Animals of Dawn
by
Murat Nemet-Nejat
"Not a mouse's stirring"
the crumbs of the clock
spilled from
tulle
curtains, as the night
ended, light in
smithereens
slowly in the eyelashes of
my cat dispersing
over the rug.
Who’ll pick them up
now, the leftovers
from the shuttle worriless
humming on.
Morning streamed from the
hair
of the widow,
sprinkles of the clock and
light.
I
opened my hands, but as I
opened them
they still kept streaming
streaming streaming.
wall. ghost. mirror. bird. arras.
window. wind. widow. tree.
dew. water. tears. river.
mourning.
painting. panting.
death. hearth,
etc.
Mayflies[1]
Infinite possibility doesn't
mean freedom, but that it may happen infinitely
but of maybes
Infinite possibility, within
finality
that is the pharosrhythm
perception of freedom
as gestures of maybes
prr
object ivities in a mirror existing
in continuum.
The Garden of Love
While simultaneously in your
heart you were discarding me, scanning with your eyes you wanted to etch (yes,
that's what you said!) in your mind a virtual image of my room.
Calling me a parasite! When
my mind couldn't quite absorb the word and misheard it as virus (someone
already part of one's being), you corrected me—not virus, parasite (of course,
I was grabbing at straws, virus is lodged, parasite can be discharged). Just an
eaon of a week ago I was your liberator, Paris to your Helen...
Yet, yet wasn't I already
anticipating in the whispers of your fury, and in its miracular caresses, the
upcoming calamity?
Wasn't I, the inconceivable interior of your open
wound[2]?
Poems As
Commentary
A commentary on a word or a phrase
in a holy text can only be an
ideogram. An illumination. Fragments in things,
real or unreal, objects, living or un-living[3]
are instant ideograms. Each a clear image made of recalcitrant parts, a mosaic
of discrete moments of light—as stars in the night sky—that light the place in
visible darkness, and disappear.
A Poetics of Motion
Gentleman:
... You have seen
Sunshine
and rain at once—her smiles and tears
Were
like a better way. Those happy smilets
That
played on her ripe lip seemed not to know
What
guests were in her eyes, which parted thence
As
pearls from diamonds dropped....
(King Lear, Act 4, Scene 3)
I am in the middle of ruminating on an
essay on the idea of the horizontality of time—that time is not defined by
memory (therefore vertical—memory is deceptive); but by attention, therefore
horizontal. All experience exists on a field possessing colorations collapsed
onto a flat field. They—star-like— flash at different times, captured by a solipsism of the mind's
attention. That discontinuous capture by the mind of a point in a
continuum—that is chaos—is what consciousness, a.k.a. time, is.
Attention has no depth. Only
intensity. And d u r a t i o . . .
i
n
a
n
i
n
s
t
a
n
t
rectangle
Duration is the elastic,
subjective face of time, short, long, it may smile or forget you.
In the music of time
there're no bars.
The time, that is within
time, is chaos.
In the heart of chaos, in
the chaos within chaos, motion d i s a p p e a r s
Rectangular
a hippo's anus
s
a u p
n N I
Z E D
b a O O
I O
i I N N
E
s h i s t O s
p r l
u
c o e l
s e
o f i
e o
p
s p
i
s h
of seduction
duration of an instant of
love: leaves, surrounded by forgetfulness
I left water behind, with
its shadow.
I wrote my name on a
tree carved
as it slept.
then I extricated myself
from it
and left.
[1]
Mayflies, primitive aquatic creatures, wondrous and comical in shape, grazing,
caressing the darkness of water.
[3] things, real
or unreal, objects, living or un-living is a longer serial poem of which Animals
of Dawn is a part.
*****
Poet, translator from Turkish and essayist, Murat Nemet-Nejat's recent work includes the poems Animals of Dawn (Talisman House, 2016), The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011), the collaboration with the poet Standard Schaefer "Alphabet Dialogues/Penis Monologues"; the translations Seyhan Erözçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman House, 2010), the republication by Green Integer Press of Ece Ayhan's A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (2015); and the essays "A Dialogue with Olga" (Olga Chernysheva/ Vague Accent, The Drawing Center, 2016), "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda" (Letters for Olson, edited by Benjamin Hollander, Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterward" (Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich (University of Michigan Press, 2016), "Istanbul Noir" (Istanbul: Metamorphoses In an Imperial City, edited by M. Akif Kirecci and Edward Foster (Talisman House, 2011). He is the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat (Talisman House, 2004). He is presently working on the poem Camels and Weasels, and a collection of translations from the Turkish poet Sami Baydar.
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