Dana Gioia - Interrogations at noon (2001)

7 Sourced Quotes

View all Dana Gioia Quotes
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.

Dana Gioia
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.

Dana Gioia
What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

Dana Gioia
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.

Dana Gioia
We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.

Dana Gioia
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.

Dana Gioia
"We lived in places that we never knew.
We could not name the birds perched on our sill,
Or see the trees we cut down for our view.
What we possessed we always chose to kill. "We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim,
And when we died, they laid us on her breast,
But she refuses us — until we earn
Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed."

Dana Gioia