Words are names.  To write a poem is to practice a naming ceremony.

          These figures moving in my rhyme,
          Who are they?  Death, and Death’s dog, time.   

And to confer a name is to confer being.  We perceive existence by means of words and names.  To this or that vague, potential thing, I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived.  The name enables me to see it.  I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.

—N. Scott Momaday—

Source:
Fred’s Place

These are the author’s favorite poems, according to the Interview in the Paris Review

Before An Old Painting Of The Crucifixion

I ponder how He died, despairing once.
I’ve heard the cry subside in vacant skies,
In clearings where no other was. Despair,
Which, in the vibrant wake of utterance,
Resides in desolate calm, preoccupies,
Though it is still. There is no solace there.

That calm inhabits wilderness, the sea,
And where no peace inheres but solitude;
Near death it most impends. It was for Him,
Absurd and public in His agony,
Inscrutably itself, nor misconstrued,
Nor metaphrased in art or pseudonym:

A vague contagion. Old, the mural fades…
Reminded of the fainter sea I scanned,
I recollect: How mute in constancy!
I could not leave the wall of palisades
Till cormorants returned my eyes on land.
The mural but implies eternity:

Not death, but silence after death is change.
Judean hills, the endless afternoon,
The farther groves and arbors seasonless
But fix the mind within the moment’s range.
Where evening would obscure our sorrow soon,
There shines too much a sterile loveliness.

No imprecisions of commingled shade,
No shimmering deceptions of the sun,
Herein no semblances remark the cold
Unhindered swell of time, for time is stayed.
The Passion wanes into oblivion,
And time and timelessness confuse, I’m told.

These centuries removed from either fact
Have lain upon the critical expanse
And been of little consequence. The void
Is calendared in stone; the human act,
Outrageous, is in vain. The hours advance
Like flecks of foam borne landward and destroyed.

Source: Poemhunter

The Bear

  What ruse of vision,
escarping the wall of leaves,
  rending incision
into countless surfaces,

  would cull and color
his somnolence, whose old age
  has outworn valor,
all but the fact of courage?

  Seen, he does not come,
move, but seems forever there,
  dimensionless, dumb,
in the windless noon’s hot glare.

  More scarred than others
these years since the trap maimed him,
  pain slants his withers,
drawing up the crooked limb.

  Then he is gone, whole,
without urgency, from sight,
  as buzzards control,
imperceptibly, their flight.
 

The quotation and poem are from
—N. Scott Momaday—
In the Presence of the Sun:  Stories and Poems

Source:
Fred’s Place

Angle Of Geese Poem

How shall we adorn
Recognition with our speech?—
Now the dead firstborn
Will lag in the wake of words.

Custom intervenes;
We are civil, something more:
More than language means,
The mute presence mulls and marks.

Almost of a mind,
We take measure of the loss;
I am slow to find
The mere margin of repose.

And one November
It was longer in the watch,
As if forever,
Of the huge ancestral goose.

So much symmetry!—
Like the pale angle of time
And eternity.
The great shape labored and fell.

Quit of hope and hurt,
It held a motionless gaze
Wide of time, alert,
On the dark distant flurry.

Source:  Poemhunter