05.10.08
Words
by Dana Gioia
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–illicit, 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 that engendered it. The
daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always–greater than ourselves
and all the airy words we summon.
