Will I Be Still the Hero

Lately I see things
fade to a dark shade
till they wear through
their own orbit.
 
What strikes my eye
is an altercation of fluency.
 
Part concomitance
of form. Part vacuum
that sucks me in.
 
I am stuck
between one
and zero
 
cropping for myself
a place in nature:
the answer to form
is the formless.
 
What’s finished
feeling incomplete instead
moves back and forth
across the edges.
 
The lake which is dark
is the ceiling of reality.
 
The time on the water
drinks the water.
 
I take this
what voice speaks out
 
that it have simply
in mind to exist
outside the occasional,
 
one and the same
ordinary act of speaking,   
 
else not think of
one who wouldn’t
know then  
or nor would I.
 
I dream of another end.
 
It was never for ever
for certain.

Mirror Language

The poem grows a little every time you read it.

New centers of reality are rendered 
somewhere else away from the here and now
as in a painting.

                Far off, long ways you must stop, 

                       think over: all you 
forget a language, because 
           wrong, a language forgets you.   

Don’t words 
articulate  
               the sky and land in unchecked sliding
                                    fragments fusing a suspended 
state,

turn around, 
they disappear…

The wind rises: 
exuberance. 
Warren of polymer dots           

warp-bubble feathers fall upon the water.

Ghostdance vertigo. 

Did you not know that
in translation   
         
one becomes less than a person more than a person
ever was   
                             of whom neither remembers
                    nothing. 
 
Is this the limit to the poem?

Manifold

With the hands close to the body, breathing evenly, 
the performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem 
but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity. 

In on the con– 

conscious. 
A near uroboric act.

Else take it in simply
by reading—reading as searching 
as the act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself,

pieced out in the only medium you experience,
the one crossing over from another…


                              … Here you appear and turn 
                     and turn again. Light comes through from a high window 
                         out of frame,
 
at the most quiet. All the dead poets you love stand in the empty yard. 
Their arteries are weighted octaves 
that truly receive time.

                                But all time already exists 
         in you—both past and present
held together at once by a now in process 
              yet the story remains something hunting for—to let go, 
                            let it be told,

                so tell it, let go of--
           you deliver the news to no one and know there can be none 
                               made of any substance.

Reincarnations of sense-objects 
seem whole to you 
in a world, 

a mind sectioned 
by arcs and aural circles 
where thoughts come at reality in light of a new survey, 
lines burst wide open around living grains of magic. Decrust--
and the breadcrumbs stick together. Fotomontaggi: a fresh loaf pops out.   
Notes:
  • The performance may refocus the sheer presence of the poem but at the same time deny its unitary consciousness, its metaphysical unity – in reference to Charles Bernstein’s introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word
  • In on the con—conscious – in reference to In the Future, by Rae Armantrout
  • Reading as searching as being the act – in reference to Leslie Scalapino’s introduction to Of Indigo and Saffron, by Michael McClure
  • The act that splits the mind and sets it in a state of conflict with itself – in reference to Eros the Bittersweet - An Essay, by Anne Carson
Daniel Carden Nemo is a poet, translator, and photographer. His work has appeared in Magma Poetry, RHINO, Full Stop, Off the Coast, and elsewhere.