The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

By Jack Gilbert

Hi. This week, honestly, I feel a bit zapped and uninspired so, I’m doing things differently. But I won’t make a habit of it!!

Over the weekend we were honored to be in the wedding of some dear friends and their vows were beautiful. Honestly, they should start a newsletter 😏. One of them spoke of the limitation of words and the inability of language to fully embody a person (especially a great one!).

This insufficiency is something that I love about language as a whole, but especially about poetry. We try regardless. And when the tools of language (syntax, rhythm, etc.) fail us, we break them, shape them and try something new, all in service of getting closer to the truth. Rather than write a poem this week, I’m including one of my all-time favorites. It’s about love and language. It feels true to me.

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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.

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Here’s him reading it. What a gift.

You thought you were getting out of here without a poem by me… nice try. I just remembered a poem I wrote for D a year or so ago that had to do with me trying to capture her in a few words as I watched our neighbor, crow, play in a puddle.

D as Crow

Knee deep in roof sop crow
flitter flutters
jitter jutters
dunks quick as if
searching always searching
of course, it can’t see
its movement casting
a billion fucking crystals
for the loved and the lucky

Thanks for reading.