The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

How astonishing it is
that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite.
Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write,
and the words get it all wrong.
We say bread and it means according
to which nation.
French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure.
A people in northern India is dying out
because their ancient tongue
has no words for endearment.
I dream of lost vocabularies that
might express some of what
we no longer can.
Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why
the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not.
When the thousands of mysterious
Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records.
But what if they are poems or psalms?
My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent
in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt
and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley
lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen
loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton.
My love is a hundred pitchers of honey.
Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body.
Giraffes are this desire in the dark.
Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map.
What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon,
horses, and birds.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on American Poems