WORDS
The world does not need words. It articulates
itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no
less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only
the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words
were spoken.
And one word transforms it into something less or other
—
illict, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it
a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a
shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.
Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or
read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than
seeing it as jasper —
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the
Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.
The
sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and
leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds
hat engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always —
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.
INTERROGATIONS AT NOON
Just before noon I often hear a
voice,
Cool and insistent, whispering in my head.
It is the better man I
might have been,
Who chronicles the life I've never led.
He cannot
understand what grim mistake
Granted me life but left him still unborn.
He views his wayward brother with regret
And hardly bothers to disguise
his scorn.
"Who is the person you pretend to be?"
He asks, "The
failed saint, the simpering bore,
The pale connoisseur of spent desire,
The half-hearted hermit eyeing the door?
"You cultivate confusion
like a rose
In watery lies too weak to be untrue,
And play the minor
figures in the pageant,
Extravagant and empty, that is you."
CURRICULUM VITAE
The future shrinks
Whether the
past
Is well or badly spent.
We shape our lives
Although their
forms
Are never what we meant.
LONG DISTANCE
Two weeks of silence broken by this call,
She holds the neutral phone
against her cheek,
Hearing his whisper cross a continent.
Once words
were never distant from his lips.
Now sound alone would stroke her like a
kiss.
She could tell him everything in touch
And read his certain
answers in embrace.
But now his voice seems oddly out of place,
Almost
anonymous, as if she overheard
A stranger talking on another line.
The conversation finished, phone in hand,
She wonders who has
spoken, what was said?
Why is a lover's touch most keenly felt
The moment
it is first withheld? She sees
The miles between them stretch beyond her
reach.
She would forgive him now if he were here
And fall into his
soothing arms like sleep.
His arms would be her answers, uninquired.
But
words are never as precise as touch.
Now words have no body to ask her love.
Copyright © 2001 by Dana Gioia. All rights reserved.
