This World Is Not Conclusion

Peter Gizzi

1959 –

When I look out your window I see another window
I see a wedding in my brain, a stylus and a groove
a voice waving there

When I look out your window I see another window
these trees are not real they grow out of air
they fell like dust they fell

So singing is seeing and vision is music
I saw diadems and crowns, daisies and bees, ribbons, robins,
and disks of snow
sprung effects in pencil-light

When I look out your window I see another window
I see a fire and a girl, crimson hair and hazel eyes
a public in the sky

When the world comes back it will be recorded sound
that cooing shrub will be known as dickinson
the syllabic, fricative, percussive, and phatic will tear open

Out your window I see another window
I see a funeral in the air I see alabaster space
I read circumference there

"This World Is Not Conclusion" from Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) by Peter Gizzi. Used with permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Bardo

I've spent my life 
in a lone mechanical whine, 

this combustion far off.

How fathomless to be 
embedded in glacial ice,

what piece of self hiding there.

I am not sure about meaning 
but understand the wave.

No more Novalis out loud.

No Juan de la Cruz singing 
"I do not die to die."

No solstice, midhaven, midi, nor twilight.

No isn't it amazing, no 
none of that.

To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble.

The trees the air warms into 
a bright something

a bluish nothing into 

clicks and pops 
bursts and percussive runs.

I come with my asymmetries,
my untutored imaginati

Peter Gizzi

2012

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

Peter Gizzi

2007

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.

Peter Gizzi

2003

Poems

This World Is Not Conclusion

More by this poet

Bardo

Bolshevescent

It Was Raining in Delft

Poems

Page submenu block

This World Is Not Conclusion

More by this poet

Bardo

Bolshevescent

It Was Raining in Delft

Newsletter Sign Up