… is a stranger and more difficult poem than Moritz’s (see the post below this one), but it says similar things about mothers. Both poets go restlessly in search of reality, essence, the thing in itself, imperishable being — hypostasis. Moritz sees its traces in his inexplicable deathless adolescent journals; with the advent of a new year, Gizzi finds himself set on a similar search – for true foundations that might free him into a new bold authentic life.

But his first stanza notes his cowardice:

For why am I afraid to sing
the fundamental shape of awe
should I now begin to sing the silvered back of
the winter willow spear
the sparkling agate blue
would this blade and this sky free me to speak
intransitive lack –

Why is he afraid to be full-throated in his expression of the basic bliss of being? Could he use the blade, the spear, of the willow leaf to cut himself free from repression? Is it just a matter of launching his poem, his song, in praise of nature? If he trusts the poetry, will it lead him to the light?

Of what am I afraid
of what lies in back of me of day
these stars scattered as far as the I
what world and wherefore
will it shake free
why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy
for a while
flagrant and alive

Yeah well and if I do happen to gain access to the world of light, to essential being, what if it scares the shit out of me? “What world?” the poet quite reasonably asks. The mind has mountains, says Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it also has light years in it (“stars scattered as far as the I”), and maybe we don’t want to know our own capacities, our deepest and most distant possibilities. What will access to essences “shake free”?

For every icon of flagrant aliveness, there’s this:

Then what of night
of hours’ unpredicated bad luck and the rot
it clings to
fathomless on the far side in winter dark

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself
what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate
and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky
by water and wind shaken
I am born in silvered dark

Maybe all I really evoke when I boldly gain access to awe is the felt disappearance of me from the world, my transformation from a living human form to a thing, an object. The forms not themselves but only itself. I am earthy material; for the moment life is breathed into me; but I am ultimately earthy material only. What I live in this life is not really light but dark occasionally “silvered” by shafts of light.

between the hypostatic scenes of breathing
and becoming the thing I see
are they not the same

You got your basic death anxiety here, babe; courage to poke into the truth is courage to reckon with your ultimate permanent thinginess.

So like Moritz Gizzi will spend the rest of the poem remarking upon the shabby unreadable enigma of the material world, a world whose (again post-industrial) rusting speaks of some once-vibrant, once-lofty world-infancy from which the poet has fallen away.

Things don’t look good on the street today
beside a tower in a rusting lot
one is a condition the other mystery
even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing
a towering absence vibrating air

The tower is an object, part of our conditioned, transitive (see his first stanza; he’s after the intransitive) world; our “rusting lot” (our fortune, our fate, is to rust) is an unconditional mystery, one particularly hard to fathom and tolerate given the flagrant and alive afternoon daisy, not to mention whatever invisible force is making the afternoon light so glorious. How can we handle this impossible duality?

Shake and I see pots from old shake
and I see cities anew
I see robes shake I see desert
I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day
the day inside night as tones decay
and border air
it is the old songs and the present wind I sing
and say I love the unknown sound in a word

Shake yourself into the truth and you see the truth: One’s own transient, insubstantial being, everyone’s brief afternoon (the farthing in us all the ghost of day). So okay, the poet will try to sing both: the old songs and the present wind; and meanwhile why not rest, as the Buddhists say, in the mystery? Why not – instead of restless hypostasis-seeking – find a way to love the unknown sound?

Okay, and finally la mama:

Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve
of a dying word
of impish laughter in the midst my joy
I compel and confess open form
my cracked hinged picture doubled

I can’t remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young
when I was high
on a sidewalk I hear “buy a sweatshirt?” and think
buy a shirt from the sweat of children
hell
I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem
and this sound
caught in the most recent coup

Somewhat querulous question, that. But anyway the target here would be the speaker’s mother, because she gave him life into this weird world of joy and dying, this place where the poet does indeed find the courage to confess, openly, his hopeless entanglement in blissful being and hideous anticipatory thinginess.

The specific, daily place where the poet’s truest consciousness resides is in a kind of lifelong auditory sensitivity to the way in which the tragic night-ghost-decay truth sidles – it’s a humane tolerable pun-like way – into the poet’s high-noon walk. (The hell of the sweat of children.)