Dana Gioia

“My blessed California, you are so wise.You render death abstract, efficient, clean.Your afterlife is only real estate,And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.”

“We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.”

“This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,a rosary of words to count out time'sillusions, all the minutes, hours, daysthe calendar compounds as if the pastexisted somewhere — like an inheritancestill waiting to be claimed.”

“Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannotname 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 Kiowacarved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.”

“Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenlyto find an unexpected waterfall,not half a mile from the nearest road,a spot so hard to reach that no one comes —a hiding place, a shrine for dragonfliesand nesting jays, a sign that there is stillone piece of property that won't be owned.”

“The music that of common speechbut slanted so that each detailsounds unexpected as a sharpinserted in a simple scale.”

“Money. You don't know where it's been,but you put it where your mouth is.And it talks.”

“How many voices have escaped you until now,the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,the steady accusations of the clocknumbering the minutes no one will mark.The terrible clarity this moment brings,the useless insight, the unbroken dark.”