Jacket 26 - Peter Gizzi - Often I am Allowed These Messages

as if caught up in excess
that is the undoing
                               but the design

having been made
is mine

an entire other to sun
so that a limb extends

to an illiterate place
wherefrom a field unfolds

wherefrom this world insists
and I say
                 the unimaginable distances

whose inscription remains
in the speed behind smiles
whose slippery light connects towns

and is a human power
                                     this body

a conductor in an uninformed territory

whose banner displays a history
from an ineffable lexicon

often I am allowed these messages
as if the field could compose
that which arrives
                               out of nothing

everlasting proposition of sound

This poem is structured by the first words of lines from Robert Duncan’s famous poem ‘Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’. Written in 1988, ‘Often I am Allowed These Messages’ appears in Peter Gizzi, Periplum and Other Poems (1987–92) from Salt Publications in Cambridge UK.

Jacket 26 — October 2004 Contents page
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