The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart - Finding Words

I've come to a place in life where only poetry will do.  Poems are the only baggage I want to carry with me to sea.  Those words, distilled to their essential rightness, meaning as close to their intention as words can anymore, maybe as they ever could. I can't explain this thirst for poems beyond that there is something in them that tells the truth about this journey we call life.  It's my own particular bias - poetry - and my own particular need - authenticity.

I pay attention to poems when they find me.  They speak as the gods might have if these were the times when they spoke truly, made visitations, communicated with mortals as they did back in the times of myth and magic.  And woe to the mortal that did n't listen to the gods when they talked. It never ended well, which is why I pay attention to poems when they find me.

This poem was a gift, a surprise, as the best kind of gifts often are.  I am beginning to feel the pull of this place and the writing that it asks of me, a different kind of writing then California asked, and this poem somehow touches on that difference, gives the first voice to the me I'm just discovering.

I've read a bit about Jack Gilbert.  I'm not really sure what a man who in his later years counseled small pleasures and limited hopes can say to someone who has made such a change at such a time for a life that is more than small pleasures and small hopes.  I wonder if there is something in his search for words to call things into being, finding words that mean almost but not quite, maybe not finding the words at all.  And what about the need to call things into being?  What do we do if there are no words or if we can't find the right ones and what we call isn't right at all?  I don't know what Florida has to teach me, but I think I may be starting to find out.


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