The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart by Jack Gilbert.

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 tombsare 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 laguage but a map.
What we feel most has no name
but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.