Читать книгу In Defense of Nothing - Peter Gizzi - Страница 24
ОглавлениеNEW PICNIC TIME
Unless the giddy heaven fall —ANDREW MARVELL
1.
Out of this close horizon there are animals
breathing unlike a child’s drawing of a nativity.
Orbiting circles with brown x’s. Farther off
pedestrians make parallel lines and collapse
into distance. Or becoming one of several skylines
in charcoal or finger-paint.
2.
At zero hour an earth unwrites itself.
Becomes an indelible number line
counting backward to embrace its new horizon,
indefatigable zero. The high lit window.
A person tethered to a desk. This city and its outline
its rivers, its cemeteries.
3.
Invisible, the orchard keeper’s mansion
is everywhere. The heart becomes one, last stone
of an existing grove and a squatter’s earth.
Thus in persons and in plants also stone.
And the brilliant element of fire and to the helix
and throughout the electrics: salt.
4.
Beyond this image decomposing: desire. And as always
with the mouth there is earth. Because it calls, fear is redundant.
And that animal sound in late night is only its own. Speech
becoming one, becoming air, books outlasting buildings
outlast sweat and the broken human form a body labors.
Whose face is the same as another?
5.
Nothing spoke for itself. Every action implied a rhetoric
so it may recognize itself. To teach, to celebrate virtue,
to persuade by example, to lead the court to its ideal self
through wonder. Same page same fable trajectory. A window.
The young father dreaming. A hand a face a feeling.
It was a sound he heard.
6.
The way of earthworms and coffins of dead infants,
cobwebs and deformity, of windows and the children