Peter Gizzi

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.
I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.
...

I've spent my life in a lone mechanical whine,
this combustion far off.
...

You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
...

If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional
if of arrows the condition of if
...

The shine on her buckle took precedence in sun
Her shine, I should say, could take me anywhere
It feels right to be up this close in tight wind
...

1

I wanted out of the past so I ate the air,
it took me further into air.
It cut me, an iridescent chord
of geometric light.
I breathed deep, it lit me up, it was good.
All these years, lightning, rain, the sky,
its little daisies.
Memento mori and lux.



2

And you can't blame me.
This daisy-feeling.
I was a poet with a death-style of my own
waking.
I occupy the rest of it.
A blue-green leaving feeling.
To no longer belong to a body sometimes
open to air.
In rain, in early morning rain.



3

Today was the day of the amphitheater in mind.
The day of a dreaming speech where the light is dope
and that's all you can say.
When a feeling degrades and evolves into thought like
2 a.m. dilated, revealed a star.
It will say this long agony is great being awake.
It is being lovely now.



4

All the stars are here that belonged to whatever
was speaking.
I built my life out of what was left of me.
Sky and its procedures.
A romanticism of clouds, trees, pale crenellations,
and poetry.
A musical joybang.
Touching everything.



5

When the words come back their fictions remain.
Thunderheads and rain, lexical waters raking gutters,
carving a world.
The stylus will live in the flash.
A daring light from pewter to whatever.
Now discrete observations produce undramatic sound,
like I am a bubble,
make me the sea. O, make me the sea.



6

For a long time the names of things and things unnamed.
For a long time hawks and their chicks, fox and their cubs,
mice and their mice.
For a long time bunnies and boojum, and a name
for every bird in me.
I am native to feathers — their netherside.



7

The sun was a goldish wave taped to a book.
A wavy diagram in a fusty book.
Foxed old wave.
A soft electro-fuzz enters the head.
A soft fuzzy opiate lightness.
What could be the message in this
pointillist masquerade.
What use memory.



8

I came from a different world.
I will die in it.
Someone saw it, I love them for seeing it.
I love seeing it with them.
Love watching it die in me.
It wasn't behind or beside me.
Finding it wasn't it.
Being it was everything.
That was the thing I thought as I fell.



9

I am that thing in morning, whatever motors in the skull,
something is claimed.
Sudden rain keeps it real.
Rooftops from the window look stunned.
Cleansed.
Looking out over the day, the pale performing day.
I always consult the air before composing air.



10

And what have you been given, the blue nothing asks,
who are you under clanging brass?
Who are you, Saturday; sing to me.
See the crows thread summerismus.
Afternoon shade mirrors an issuelessness.
A perfection of beetle slowly treading summer's blade.
The leaves broadcast color.
I was born in summer, my conqueror,
breaking into wisteria.



11

The sun was a golden rag nailed to a ladder.
And here the marigolds grow down to the banks.
The mayflies drowse above water.
How then the dazzling surface and its dictions
under piled clouds,
and clouds sitting there by place and sound.
One thing. This thing and sound glitters.
Indicative transitive particular battles the void.
All afternoon a green-gold silent light
on the spotted grass, sprung.



12

I know it's summer even if I can't decipher the call.
I believe in the birds haunting me. I held on.
I'm full of bluster but also full of vision.
I'm not ready to put the book down.
To stop singing bright spots thrilling the quicksilver
over my torrent.
I make sounds, forget to die. I call it living,
this inhuman conch in the ear.
A pewter sensation and wind.



13

The sun remains a yellow sail tacked to the sky.
I am climbing air here. I am here
in the open.
The kestrel swerves.
Its silent kerning.
A stunning calibration of nothing.
I'm left to see.
...

Wisdom is a kindly spirit but does it love me? And righteousness? There's nothing in it.
To poetry I leave my senses, my deregulation, custodial duties, and to be a janitor is a great consolation.
It gave me my mother back through all her years.
To love these children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess.
To my mother I leave my veil, my wing, the window and time. I, artifact. In this age the hand is a voice.
I leave the voice, the wonder, the mirror, and my lens, bent and beholden to the worm, leaf-work in wrought iron, eerie illuminations and deep-sea vision.
I've seen the Eurostar, the drunken boat, and Davy Jones' Locker. I've seen Spanish galleons and the H.S. Mauberley covered in brine.
There is this line from cloud dander to the solo bulb of mourning, a string through common prayer.
I like it when the gray-green shadows suddenly dayglo over the rushes. The wind in my head.
To write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, communard, my friendo.
What is it finally thinking what in winter's dusty alcove, the body tocks. The day was cloudy. The light muddy, dreary when they took it down.
To Times Roman I give my stammer, my sullenness, my new world violence, form and all that, forms, and all that paper, gusts. Little buttress.
I send love and weapons to everyone possessed with night visions.
When those green lights flash and blink, is that it? When the "it" continues strangely for a bit, then falls into a line, is it over?
I quantified daily the wonder in the grain.
I found I was over and singular yet many, the many and the singular, the many and the evolutionary, the many in the grain. Many more.
Who in hell am I writing for?
This vision is silly, teenage, and mine, a spot on the negative, a hole in composition. I quantify, I loaf, I wonder, I find, I rev.
Here the days' mud, night is a satellite, and anger, my cleft, my birthmark and star.
Anger might be a better way to say "I love you," truer than "how are you in space"? Are you cold, can I get you a blanket?
To the polestar I leave my alien regalia, my off-world headdress. I leave acoustic forms in time, blooming, sudsy, inconsolable.
If you are unsatisfied, then welcome.
Here there are people working every corner of every inch of grass. The meticulously arranged outside reminds me of ocean and feels old.
In space the letterforms "I love" oscillate in waves.
I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say "goodbye" when I meant to say "how come."
Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience.
More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling.
If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever.
To mercy I leave whatever.
...

For why am I afraid to sing
the fundamental shape of awe
should I now begin to sing the silvered back of
the winter willow spear
the sparkling agate blue
would this blade and this sky free me to speak
intransitive lack -

the vowels themselves free

Of what am I afraid
of what lies in back of me of day
these stars scattered as far as the I
what world and wherefore
will it shake free
why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy
for a while
flagrant and alive

Then what of night
of hours' unpredicated bad luck and the rot
it clings to
fathomless on the far side in winter dark

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself
what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate
and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky
by water and wind shaken
I am born in silvered dark

Of what am I to see these things between myself
and nothing
between the curtain and the stain
between the hypostatic scenes of breathing
and becoming the thing I see
are they not the same

Things don't look good on the street today
beside a tower in a rusting lot
one is a condition the other mystery
even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing
a towering absence vibrating air

Shake and I see pots from old shake
and I see cities anew
I see robes shake I see desert
I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day
the day inside night as tones decay
and border air
it is the old songs and the present wind I sing
and say I love the unknown sound in a word

Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve
of a dying word
of impish laughter in the midst my joy
I compel and confess open form
my cracked hinged picture doubled

I can't remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young
when I was high
on a sidewalk I hear "buy a sweatshirt?" and think
buy a shirt from the sweat of children
hell
I'm just taking a walk in the sun in a poem
and this sound
caught in the most recent coup
...

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
and the people in them on their way.
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.
It's hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
hydrogen & oxygen binding, it'll have to do.
This sky with its macular clouds also
and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.
...

A morning's silver announces sky
Speech bent the tree into a new posture

My smile is becoming different from you.

—becoming—and you crave an earlier affection
Where was the silver becoming from?

Who forgets that we dream—who forgets we dream

The dark is near! That loss was dark; there that's darker!

A page, we become

* * *

You read the page
—you read this page

Once upon a once there was a once
and that once evaporated into air

it was said it once was all over the sky
then once came back and died

You understood what I saw
You understood everything

—close the door now

It knows where to be
Here, can you explain?

A light bulb replaced the silver


* * *

The page is silvery—almost as silver
—announced a child—

When it went to the town
—it had changed

When it became the town
—it changed its shape

Afterword said it didn't have its own way
It didn't have a once in its life—

a once and for all

It took a wife . . .

The end, the ending

* * *

Children ran from the tree
Silver poured from the sky

—in the garden birds bathed—
bathing in the garden birds sang

It was dizzy in the air and rosy on the wind

Once once came along and spoke to the bride

It thought the wood enchanted
Afterword said it was empty

Afterword came too and spoke to the groom

It thought the world was wide
Afterword said it was narrow

* * *

Syntax bent the child
—playing on the page

Speech—be quiet!

To see you reflected in the smudged window now.
Night reminds one of fingerprints—

unlike a face
—in its orbit

Tips of hair sweep by like fronds
—'just like fronds!'—you exclaim

—show me the fronds if you please

* * *

Becoming a tree
—the children . . .

Becoming a page
—the birds in unison

From here to the nervous system—A body sang
Suspended above the page

Above the total mass of trees
Willows bend to console the child

From here to . . .

—a lovely thing—

Becoming a tree

* * *

Let us return to speech—

Silver morning—bent to break
—syntax

Up there on a stage
Children carry silver leaves

—carry birds on their heads

You fasten me with your songs
The Fables say—

where a page is a page
and a tree tree

I used to be a book
Now I am a book

All the endings say
All the dreams say

All the children say

* * *

Once upon a once there was a once
and that once evaporated into air
it was said it once was all over the sky
then once came back and died

It was said—

my smile is becoming a page
—becoming an adventure

It sang—

my smile is what the children say
...

Those notes are fetching
when they touch the ear.
It's true, there are more tears
in sand than water.
'Come out and play,'
the song's refrain
in my head, my sawdust showing.
My heart, your eyes
is what the day made.

There, the notes, the song,
the besidedness to live
on Saturday, to walk out,
wanted to, right out the frame.
The sadness, gas pumps,
sunshine on oil,
that crow overhead
destroys the picture.
Everything faking it so badly.

What's so wrong about the real,
so off with clarity,
dumbfuck, shirttail-hanging
scatter-brained word.
Shattered-pane world?

The whir of the camera inside pictures
but we want the voice to lift,
don't we, across the mini-plaza
to where? How about
pulling taffy for a living
or a rabbit from one ideal-ology
to another. That's the trick
isn't it, parallel lives?

You know, here a dumpster
there a Dane. On the street
I see birds, bricks, clouds
I see a friend getting into her car
I see myself in the puddle I see.
And even if we pray to remain
unabated, a minor chord
can sometimes reconnoiter
the most distant thoughts
camouflaged in lace and literature.

O western wind let's not
decorate the light with roseate diadems,
plumbago shadows in the rushes.
Haven't we heard enough
from the birds, their annual trips
and cross-talk? Listen.
The arc of a rocket
is louder than a rainbow.
...

The shine on her buckle took precedence in sun
Her shine, I should say, could take me anywhere
It feels right to be up this close in tight wind
It feels right to notice all the shiny things about you
About you there is nothing I wouldn't want to know
With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler
About you many good things come into relation
I think of proofs and grammar, vowel sounds, like
A is for knee socks, E for panties
I is for buttondown, O the blouse you wear
U is for hair clip, and Y your tight skirt
The music picks up again, I am the man I hope to be
The bright air hangs freely near your newly cut hair
It is so easy now to see gravity at work in your face
Easy to understand time, that dark process
To accept it as a beautiful process, your face
...

If today and today I am calling aloud

If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt
bits of sun, the din

if tires whine on wet pavement
everything humming

If we find we are still in motion
and have arrived in Zeno's thought, like

if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up
we might know we were loved, are loved
if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain

If our wishes are met with dirt
and thyme, thistle, oil,
heirloom, and basil

or the end result is worry, chaos
and if "I should know better"

If our loves are anointed with missiles
Apache fire, Tomahawks
did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested

If we ask that every song touch its origin
just once and the years engulfed

If problems of identity confound sages,
derelict philosophers, administrators
who can say I am found

if this time you, all of it, this time now

If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and
if rain falls sidelong in the platz
doorways, onto mansard roofs

If enumerations of the fall
and if falling, cities rocked
with gas fires at dawn

Can you rescind the ghost's double nakedness
hungry and waning

if children, soldiers, children
taken down in schools

if burning fuel

Who can't say they have seen this
and can we sing this

if in the auroras' reflecting the sea,
gauze touching the breast

Too bad for you, beautiful singer
unadorned by laurel
child of thunder and scapegoat alike

If the crowd in the mind becoming
crowded in street and villages, and trains
run next to the freeway

If exit is merely a sign
...

I am not a poet
because I live in the actual world
where fear divides light
I have no protection against
the real evils and money
which is the world
where most lives are spent

I am not a poet
because I cannot sing about
lost kingdoms of righteousness
instead I see a woman in a blue parka
crying on the street today
without hope from despair

I am not a poet
for there is nothing I can say
in smart turns to deflect
oncoming blows of every day's
inexistence that creeps into
the contemporary horizon

I am not a poet
but a witness to bear the empty
space that becomes hearts
if left to loiter or linger
without a life to share

I've seen sorrow on joy street
and heard the blur of the hurdy-gurdy
and I too know what evening means
but this is not real—poetry is
and from this have I partaken
as my eyes grow into the evolved dark
...

When I say the ghost has begun
you understand what is being said.
That time is not how we keep it
or measure
first there was then wasn't . . .
It twitters and swerves like
the evening news.
Now outside is 3D. Inside non-
representational space.
Every law has an outside
and inside
I have witnessed cruelty
break and gulp and sweat then
punch out a smile.
To be awake. This talking in space.
To be absorbed in the ongoing.
Belief's a shadow to be looked into
and into
until relief is gone. The dark
triangle settled in the midst of
traffic is on us.
Time comes in adverbial bursts,
a glass of beer, a smoke . . .
The evening air refreshes, startles,
and the questions grow deeper like
shadows across storefronts.
A forsythia ticking against
the dirty pane.
This was time. Up. Down. Up.
And you were a part of it.
If I say it can you feel it now?
Imagine. Lightning strikes. Rain
falls and drives.
Clouds pass. Night clarified. Stars.
In silent pictures the tree falls
in the optic nerve.
The sound is chemistry.
There's no getting to it or if
getting to it
feels like the actual sound
is that silence?
Alone here with my shadows
drawn . . .
So what's this about?
A horse and a castle, a tree
and its leaving?
What's this about in solitary
splendor?
The undertow and its threshold,
a door and the opening sky?
Or because a play of reflection
lit up my bumper
and caught my eyes
I saw the shadow of a falcon.
Because a sound a poor man
uttered
reached my ear I fell into song.
If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic
then what is the wager?
If there were time, would it be ours?
...

There is no better time than the present when we have lost
everything. It doesn't mean rain falling
at a certain declension, at a variable speed is without
purpose or design.
The present everything is lost in time, according to laws
of physics things shift
when we lose sight of a present,
when there is no more everything. No more presence in
everything loved.

In the expanding model things slowly drift and
everything better than the present is lost in no time.
A day mulches according to gravity
and the sow bug marches. Gone, the hinge cracks, the
gate swings a breeze,
breeze contingent upon a grace opening to air,
velocity tied to winging clay. Every anything in its
peculiar station.

The sun brightens as it bleaches, fades the spectral value
in everything seen. And chaos is no better model
when we come adrift.
When we have lost a presence when there is no more
everything. No more presence in everything loved,
losing anything to the present. I heard a fly buzz. I heard
revealed nature,
cars in the street and the garbage, footprints of a world,
every fly a perpetual window,
unalloyed life, gling, pinnacles of tar.

There is no better everything than loss when we have
time. No lack in the present better than everything.
In this expanding model rain falls
according to laws of physics, things drift. And
everything better than the present is gone
in no time. A certain declension, a variable speed.
Is there no better presence than loss?
A grace opening to air.
No better time than the present.
...

I like to read the dead.

Part of a whole lost era campaign.

The bridge is up.

A portrait of you from what you aren't saying.

On my sleeve. The verb to be.

I'm plucky but thankful.

Death and the imagination equals life itself.

Letters from an old bottle,
junk in space.

A book or a boat?

The black ribbons of a spring day
might sound mawkish

but I like to read under a pale blue sky
animated and deepening.

I like to read the dead.

There's so and so going by
everyone, outside

everyone

the words scroll onto air.

Synecdoche: act of receiving from another.

Metonymy: change of name.

Who hasn't found themselves
praying in an awkward room.

She said but what of their sad work
by the river's edge

sad way of working the moth paper light

trellis of dented garbage cans
and debris at dawn.
...

It couldn't be closer than Mars
these days. First you're off on a tangent,
then glittering beyond the call
in the backyard to no good effect.
Later when you shrugged you were blue,
I mistook it for "that's life" not "help me."
I mistake many things in dusk
like seeing liberty everywhere today,
smallish unacknowledged moments
of door holding, tossing coins
into a worn paper cup, smiling.
To rediscover our neighborhood
one wrapper and bum at a time.
Where am I going with this?
Down to the riverbank to watch the light
dazzle and showcase trees
in all their prehistoric movement.
Two more animals blinking in the breeze.
The guest-host relationship is
bigger than a house, older
than cold planets in space.
One of the earliest manuals
is about the guest-host thing.
Sit down, breathe deeply and
welcome yourselves. If you listen
you can faintly recall the song.
The sweet height of it all
breaking free from a canopy of leaves.
Remember the day
you first took in the night sky?
I mean really let it enter
and unfold along the interior
when the architecture of the body
resembles a cauldron for a dying star,
twinkle twinkle inside, and inside that
a simple hole. So now you know
what it is to be sucking air,
to be walking upright, to love.
Why not enjoy the day,
this moment to moment thing,
and the furnace above sending
you messages: breathe, dummy.
Birds do it and the rest of the ark
all following the great blank of what's next.
What's next is courage.
To take it all in and feel it for keeps,
that persons you meet
have a hole too and a twinkle.
Embrace them and have a meal.
Look straight into their impermanent flash,
the nervous-system tic of their talk.
Welcome their knowing
not knowing their coming and going.
...

You stand far from the crowd, adjacent to power.
You consider the edge as well as the frame.
You consider beauty, depth of field, lighting
to understand the field, the crowd.
Late into the day, the atmosphere explodes
and revolution, well, revolution is everything.
You begin to see for the first time
everything is just like the last thing
only its opposite and only for a moment.
When a revolution completes its orbit
the objects return only different
for having stayed the same throughout.
To continue is not what you imagined.
But what you imagined was to change
and so you have and so has the crowd.
...

There is a spike
in the air
a distant thrum
you call singing
and how many nights
this giganto, torn
tuned, I wonder if
you hear me
I mean I talk
to myself through you
hectoring air
you're out there
tonight and so am I
for as long as
I remember
I talk to the air
what is it
to be tough
what ever
do you mean
how mistaken
can I be, how
did I miss it
as I do entirely
and admit very
well then
I know nothing
of the world
can see it now
can really see
there is a spike
a distant thrum
to the empty
o'clock autumn litter
it's ominous, gratuitous
the asphalt quality
these feelings
it's Sunday in deep space
and in the breeze
scatters, felt presences
behind the hole
in the day, sparks
ominous spike
I've not been here
before, my voice is
looking for a door
this offing light
reaching into maw
what does it mean
to enter that room
the last time
I remembered it
an un gathering
every piece of
open sky into it
the deep chill
inventing, and
is it comfort
the cold returning
now clear and
crystalline cold
I standing
feet on the ground
I frozen and
I can feel it
to meet incumbent
death we carry
within us a body
frozen ground
what does it mean
to be tough
or to write a poem
I mean the whole
vortex of home
buckling inside
a deep sea whine
flash lightning
birth storms
weather of pale
blinding life
...