When I say the ghost has begun you understand what is being said. That time is not how we keep it or measure first there was then wasn’t . . . It twitters and swerves like the evening news. Now outside is 3D. Inside non- representational space. Every law has an outside and inside I have witnessed cruelty break and gulp and sweat then punch out a smile. To be awake. This talking in space. To be absorbed in the ongoing. Belief’s a shadow to be looked into and into until relief is gone. The dark triangle settled in the midst of traffic is on us. Time comes in adverbial bursts, a glass of beer, a smoke . . . The evening air refreshes, startles, and the questions grow deeper like shadows across storefronts. A forsythia ticking against the dirty pane. This was time. Up. Down. Up. And you were a part of it. If I say it can you feel it now? Imagine. Lightning strikes. Rain falls and drives. Clouds pass. Night clarified. Stars. In silent pictures the tree falls in the optic nerve. The sound is chemistry. There’s no getting to it or if getting to it feels like the actual sound is that silence? Alone here with my shadows drawn . . . So what’s this about? A horse and a castle, a tree and its leaving? What’s this about in solitary splendor? The undertow and its threshold, a door and the opening sky? Or because a play of reflection lit up my bumper and caught my eyes I saw the shadow of a falcon. Because a sound a poor man uttered reached my ear I fell into song. If the syntax of loyalty is not tragic then what is the wager? If there were time, would it be ours?
From Threshold Songs (Wesleyan University Press, 2011)
Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award; all from Wesleyan U. Press. In the UK, Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (2020) and in 2024 Penguin UK published an edition of Fierce Elegy (Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize). His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. In 2024-5, he was a Senior Global Fellow in Poetry at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
