Quote #3
The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.
More from Dana Gioia
- Money. You don't know where it's been, but you put it where your mouth is. And it talks.
- Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile f…
- How many voices have escaped you until now, the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot, the steady accusations of the clock numbering t…
- 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…
- 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 m…
- We are not as we were. Death has been our pentecost.
- My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom…
- '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…