Feeling Kent Budge’s Absence

WORDS by Dana Gioia

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 rainclouds,
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.

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Friday on this site we shared comments back and forth considering if geologic considerations may be the motive for demantling the Provo Temple and erecting its successor to its west. In the middle of that I happened to read the poem above, and I missed Kent Budge, who wrote here as Vader before he died. If that accident had not killed him, he would have had something informative to add to our musings Friday. In a month there will be an eclipse, which he would have traveled to Texas or Oklahoma to enjoy, and which I would have enjoyed hearing about from him. Death is a thief.

In honor of Kent/Vader, here is a link to a nice little primer on Utah’s Wasatch Fault. And here is a link to the Utah Geologic Hazards Portal, an interactive map incorporating a fault survey performed 2016-2018 by the Utah Geological Survey and USGS which was published in 2020 as Report of Investigation 280.