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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Gizzi
Peter Gizzi
The author of several collections, his poems have been described by the critic Marjorie Perloff as being "as memorable as they are moving and spare"...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Weddings
Epithalamium, [Happy Bridegroom]
by Sappho
In Memoriam, Epilogue, [O true and tried, so well and long]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
A Ditty
by Sir Philip Sidney
A Slice of Wedding Cake
by Robert Graves
Epithalamion
by Edmund Spenser
Epithalamium
by Matthew Rohrer
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet 116)
by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]
by Petrarch
The First Marriage
by Peter Meinke
The Kiss
by Stephen Dunn
To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet
To Sylvia, To Wed
by Robert Herrick
Wedding Poems
When a Woman Loves a Man
by David Lehman
Related Prose
Be Mine: Poems for Sweethearts
Do-It-Yourself: Poetry Infusions
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Chateau If  
by Peter Gizzi

         If love if then if now if the flowers of if the conditional
if of arrows the condition of if
         if to say light to inhabit light if to speak if to live, so
         if to say it is you if love is if your form is if your waist that
pictures the fluted stem if lavender
         if in this field
         if I were to say hummingbird it might behave as an
adjective here
         if not if the heart’s a flutter if nerves map a city if a city
on fire
         if I say myself am I saying myself (if in this instant) as if
the object of your gaze if in a sentence about love you might
write if one day if you would, so
         if to say myself if in this instance if to speak as
another—
         if only to render if in time and accept if to live now as if
disembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f
         if a creature if what you say if only to embroider—a
city that overtakes the city I write.




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from Some Values of Landscape and Weather © 2003 by Peter Gizzi. Published by Wesleyan University Press and used by permission.
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