Peter Gizzi Poems

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
...