Tuesday, April 19, 2011

twelve Ethiopian goats

I first discovered Jack Gilbert my sophmore year of college. My friend Yoko was enrolled in a Poetry Workshop and I had the delightful privilege of sitting in the hallway of the performing arts center, listening to poetry read aloud each week. Among the many poems we dissected and pondered together was this one. I re-read it now and remember my dear friend. I remember falling in love with Jack Gilbert. And I remember sitting barefoot in the dancer's hallway feeling at ease with poetry. With words. I am in love with words. They have this power to which I am completely vulnerable. After all, as Confucius said, "words are the voice 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 laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.


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