Peter Gizzi's Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992 (Salt, 2004; originally Avec, 1992)

-

The arc of my nerve alive with your salt.

"Conceit"

If you
want me, you will find me in
the garden of vestiges, next to

the sweet water cistern.

"Blue Peter"

The day is down and I dismount.

"Nocturne"

...outside my hamlet. This
little sandbox for a clumsy
heart.

"Song: I Lost My Pail"

This is my poem. The one I tuck under my eyelids when looking inhibits the distinctions of what can be seen.

*

Sad nothing can be held so thoroughly we might assimilate it.

*

Having left me to dinners, movies, books and with this incredible sickness you call enthusiasm.

"Despite Your Notices"

The morning you woke up and for a moment forgot
to call them "dead," it was the morning
of the poem.

*

...streets with cadences of wind.

*

Time is our only subject
and the mutability of forms. Time compact
and out of sight. I want the whole essay.

*

...so much emotion
goes into learning to make these letters.
A spell against time.

*

...wanting to walk
blankly off into a grove where all punctuation
lists, like you, brilliant in its particularity
and distinction.

*

It's getting hard to say now, this
exploded present, doubling back moebius
style on your gaze and the air thick
with tongues. You'll say it's too discursive.
But I have learned more from chicken soup
than all the bright contests.

"Hard as Ash"

empty of speech
empty of wind
husk
in the dimming
or time after time
my own
possibility
of form

*

how else the inexorable
breath
small and alive

*

an overturned word
ungathers
silence in the emblem
of rain

*

all day some trees
some trees
and slow water

as the grey was mistaken
for a sparrow

*

the resolve
of unmoving duration

or an open field

*

small talk issued from a wind splint

"Music for Films"

Here elaborations come
to play a surface into rapture.

"Facades for Theron Ware"