7 quotes
"Teach us the names of what we have destroyed."
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
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.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
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.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
This is not work
but a kind of workmanship.
First out of paper, then from the body.
To provoke thought into form,
molded according to a measure.
I think of a tailor
who is his own fabric.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)
This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time's
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere — like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.
Interrogations at Noon (2001)