Peter Gizzi - A Telescope Protects Its View

Independent literature for the literature-dependent.

Fall 2007, Volume III / Issue 1

Vol. I Issue 4	A Telescope Protects Its View By Peter Gizzi I like to read the dead. Part of a whole lost era campaign. The bridge is up. A portrait of you from what you aren’t saying. On my sleeve. The verb to be. I’m plucky but thankful. Death and the imagination equals life itself. Letters from an old bottle, junk in space. A book or a boat? The black ribbons of a spring day might sound mawkish but I like to read under a pale blue sky animated and deepening. I like to read the dead. There’s so and so going by everyone, outside everyone the words scroll onto air. Synecdoche: act of receiving from another. Metonymy: change of name. Who hasn’t found themselves praying in an awkward room. She said but what of their sad work by the river’s edge sad way of working the moth paper light trellis of dented garbage cans and debris at dawn. Copyright © Peter Gizzi

Photograph by Robert Seydel, 2006	Peter Gizzi’s books include Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. Currently, he teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A new book, The Outernationale, is available from Wesleyan.