To name is to know and remember

click and look close.  moonstone beach, cambria, ca

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--

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 rain clouds,

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.

                         --Dana Gioia