Gizzi - Threshold songs

ALSO BY PETER GIZZI

The Outernationale

Some Values of Landscape and Weather

Artificial Heart

Periplum

THRESHOLD SONGS

PETER GIZZI

Wesleyan University Press

MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

WESLEYAN POETRY Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
2011 Peter Gizzi ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Manufactured in the United States of America

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the
Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets
their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gizzi, Peter.
Threshold songs / Peter Gizzi.
p. cm.(Wesleyan poetry)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7174-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8195-7175-5 (ebk.)
I. Title.
PS3557.I94T7 2011
811.54dc22 2011005648

5 4 3 2 1

Frontispiece: Robert Seydel, Untitled [Starry Hare], 2008. Mixed media collage. Courtesy of the Estate of Robert Seydel. Photograph by Stephen Petegorsky

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts

*

for Robert, for Mother, for Mike
called back

A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

SAMUEL BECKETT

THRESHOLD SONGS

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
youre 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
oclock autumn litter
its ominous, gratuitous
the asphalt quality
these feelings
its Sunday in deep space
and in the breeze
scatters, felt presences
behind the hole
in the day, sparks
ominous spike
Ive 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
not under it
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

Everyones listening to someone in the air
and singing knows every chestnut from way out when
the mourning dawn of living each apple and every atom
in the tooth actually small circuits uncover vast spaces
even if invisible you see the picture field and the lightning
is there a difference between a photograph of a child
and what memorials what or what is the role of art if any
within your particular emotion machine
the limits of thought and seeing perhaps
it explains water is one way to apprehend air
the morning light is in us
a stinging charge in the mouth
this is something everyone feels at least once
here before you started listening to the song
at the beach and soldiers by a desert
if anybody looked we are all stranded by the shore of something
I mean to say seeing pictures inside as they are

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 dont 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 cant 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

Im just taking a walk in the sun in a poem and this sound

caught in the most recent coup

This clock entitled, simply, my life, speaks at irregular intervals so loud there isnt room for a boy.

Few celebrate the interval inside the tock

others merely repeat fog. The unhappening of day. The sudden storm over the house, the sudden

houses revealed in cloud cover. Snow upon the land.

This land untitled so much for soldiers, untitled so far from swans.

Sing. Flag. Boy. Idyll. Gong.

Fate disrupts the open field into housing starts, into futurities neglected corners and mites.

This again, the emptied anthem, dusty antlers, pilsner flattened.

To do the time, undo the Times for whom?

Bells swinging. The head rings no. No.

The space inside is vast.

The prayer between electrons proportionately vast.

The ancestry between air and everything is alive and all is alpha everywhere

atoms stirring, nesting, dying out, reforged elsewhere, the genealogist said.

A chromosome has 26 letters, a gene just 4. One is a nation. The other a poem.

I come to it at an edge
morphed and hobbled,
still morphing. There is also
the blowtorch grammars
unconquered flame.
That may sound laughable
but well need strength.
Well need the willows flex,
the flapping windsock.
Well need every bit
of solar wind, serious goggles.

This is the snow channel
and its snowing. Hey,
you wanted throttle,
you wanted full bore.
Stay open to adventure.
Being awake is finally
a comprehensive joy.
Stay open to that nimbus