In Defense of Nothing. Peter Gizzi

      NEW 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