A Winding Sheet for Summer Poem by Peter Gizzi

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.