Gizzi - Archeophonics

ALSO BY PETER GIZZI PeriplumArtificial HeartSome Values of Landscape and WeatherThe OuternationaleThreshold SongsIn Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 19872011ARCHEOPHONICS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT Wesleyan Poetry Wesleyan University Press Middletown CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 2016 Peter Gizzi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeset in Janson by Copperline Book Services Frontispiece by Jon Beacham / The Brother In Elysium. Untitled Winter #61. Collage, 2015. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8195-7680-4 Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8195-7681-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request. 5 4 3 2 1 Cover photo: Shutterstock.

Image ID 186039470. Alex Sun. CONTENTS FOR KENT JONES Poetry, like music, is not just song. JAMES SCHUYLER ARCHEOPHONICS Archeophonics Im just visiting this voice Im just visiting the molecular structures that say what I am saying I am just visiting the world at this moment and its on fire Its always been on fire Im saying this and its saying me Thats how it works, seesaw like The archive in the mouth and the archive is on fire Thats the story The sun and the body and the body in the sun It was like this just like this The world thats coming toward me And the world around me Around me are words saying this saying fire Saying something or all of it Field Recordings For todays tourist, orientation is impossible RIMBAUD LANGUOR The old language is the old language, with its lance and greaves, broken shields and hammered vowels; a stairway ascending into a mirrorsee it climb the old helix, beneath a scarred and chipped northerly sky, rotunda blue. Sing genetic cloud forms mirroring the syntax in reflection, and what would you have? Paving stones, rhetoric, the coping of bridges, leanings, what is taken from res? To reconstruct? To re cognize the categories have failed? That the index was a lyre. The lists have grown lonely, far from home, houses of worship, roofs, toy stores and liquor stores, names, historical furniture, descriptions of architecture, patina in a fanfare city.

I have eaten the air of that city. THRALL The old language says the apple is the old apple, it spoke in categories and gave her all the dance floor she needed, all those vocab ularies and animal nights before her, we see through to spotted fur. Lithe, the taut syllables in apple and the ecstasy of naming. Or was it knowing? Windows swing open. The chest a hammering thing. This hammering thing, life as Ive known it, know me, is over.

I might as well say it. The apples lie scattered on ground. The earth reclaims its booty right be fore the eyes. So swiftly the letters replace, the letters dearrange and uncompose the self in itself. The orchestral side is taking away me. These letters no longer anchor.

WRAPPER FRAG The world today is slowcore, a rhythm section dragging. At the moment I drag and solo in a bitten landscape, torn vowels that sound out vowel or sadness like glitter sprinkled in a mind. A sun-slashed parking lot, thinking a poem stalled in the broken surround. See the chubby kid dazed, his spilled bike, more debris, CVS in the distance. Remember me to convenience stores. I saw this too every life of my day yet I ate, I had money, and a car.

WIND INSTRUMENT There were markets used bookstores trellises and brick. These were the words I could see thinking of the body. Its strange here all the names in me. The gain and its foliage. In my last rotation it was hard to tune in. The dial was faulty.

The static lovely. It spoke to me through a grubby transom. Was that a cathedral bell or the air conditioner? Crisp air coming in. Looking out the frame I studied grass. So many pages blank. Its hard to look that close.

I watched from a high window while I slept. GLITTER Faces fly by in random litter, as September rays hit the lawns. The high-lit dry white shafts slightly vintaging. The bright horizon preening in fife air. The days go and are gone. The nights gone before us, a neon cursive glow.

If only to dream awhile, through an ascending scale of history, its ill be gotten schemes, statecraft, unwieldy theatrical devices. The old language renews the pundits chatter, can sometimes bunch in groups, power jumbotrons, or ones laughter in particular. Just now, out the car window paper flags and ballots kite. Feel the parade air on your skin. A cotton shirt touching it. The manufactured rays are ancient, fall through a time-gone ticker tape array.

The floats and whorls and banners above. The old language dozing in sun. STRANGENESS BECOMES YOU The old language is the old language. It dont mean shit. Its not where you begin its how you finish. Everyones got beer muscles when theyre young.

Try as you must. Break as you will. Solo in space clinging to space. Fuck, the air said passing a corner, a long ropy snot hitting a gutter. To know something and fail. Why discount it? The onslaught of eyes beneath a fuck-you sky.

The syntax breaks down its mangled draft and says, one day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich. I hate that, when syntax connects me to the rich. REVERB I hate how syntax connects me to shit, or say the day is jeweled and burning, the fires banking, and none of its letters produce the horror at the heart of the index. The old document hangs over the twinned stair of murder and something else that original slap of glove. The project is archival, all that blood in the mouth. The old language could have told you, its too late, we watched you die, watched you move through shocking losses and the solo flight you are taking back into the old language.

Its the same but different, different now. The mouth knows the bit, the taste of it. A NOTE Its strange here, all this time in me and time around me. I was trying to climb out from under 5AM thinking outside the truck and its engine are real. Today the slinky is 70 years old. Next year my body will be 57: it was human, it was American, it was a piece of big data, it was employed, it loved and mourned the documents behind a people.

In my time I loved people. RIME It was a language to eat the sky a language to say goodbye standing with others standing in the dust. The old language continues its dialogues in ordinary dust. When Orbital Proximity Feels Creepy Right now there are teenage microwaves screaming through your body while you are having text with me. This is the moment Ill need you to sing with me. I am making my way in some dark room looking for other structures to love.

From the left something speaking I cant identify. The floor goes unfixed and moving and this doesnt happen only at night but during the day when I dont want to think on it. That I saw a blood-orange ball caught out my window. That Im listening to light and it said time. Im listening to time, it says, ha. You need to be howling at bloody torn space.

Need to be spooked out of your hidey-hole and its glowing mess. But I love this ball Im riding on. The strange hunk of metal and rock whizzing around my loves and my loving. The fact I spin and it spins and everything is spinning close up. From far away its so cool. I guess they call this physics or they call it laws.