Wordless

“…the moon is the very image of silence – and, as Charles Simic says, “The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.” The great lunacy of most lyric poems is that they attempt to use words to convey what cannot be put into words. On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glance, one that played upon the emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter.”

- Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, (with thanks to Whiskey River)