This World Is Not Conclusion

It Was Raining in Delft

A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick.
I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower.
Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones
         and the sun now in a curbside pool.
I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I’ve been walking
         for 7 hrs on yr name day.
Dead, I am calling you now.
There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square.
Just what you’d suspect: a market with flowers and matrons,
         handbags.
Beauty walks this world. It ages everything.
I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem,
         a we-see poem, a they-love poem.
The green. All the different windows.
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each
         translucent electric blade.
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things.
         Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade.

Peter Gizzi

2003

Chateau If

         If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional
if of arrows the condition of if
         if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so
         if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that
pictures the fluted stem if lavender
         if in this field
         if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as an
adjective here
         if not if the heart’s a flutter if nerves map a city if a city
on fire
         if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as if
the object of your gaze if in a sentence about love you might
write if one day if you would, so
         if to say myself if in this instance if to speak as
another—
         if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as if
disembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f
         if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—a
city that overtakes the city I write.

Peter Gizzi

2003

Bolshevescent

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.

Peter Gizzi

2007

Poems

This World Is Not Conclusion

More by Peter Gizzi

It Was Raining in Delft

Chateau If

Bolshevescent

poets.org

academy of american poets

national poetry month

american poets

Poems

This World Is Not Conclusion

Newsletter Sign Up

Support Us

Follow Us