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.

Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road…

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 music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot.

I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.

I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.