Troy Casa, poet

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. Perhapsthe spiral Minoan script

is not a language but a map. What we feel most has

no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

 

 

from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992. Knopf:

New York, 1999

A Hard & Noble Patience

by David St. John

 

There is a hard & noble patience

I admire in my friends who are dead

Though I admit there are none of them

I would change places with

 

For one thing look how poorly they dress

 

Only one is still beautiful

& that is because

She chose to drown herself in a Swiss lake

fed by a glacier said in local myth

to be a pool of the gods

 & when her body was found she was so

Preserved by the icy currents

That even her eyelashes seemed to quiver

Beneath my breath

 

Though that was only for an instant

 

Before she was strapped to a canvas stretcher

& loaded into a blue van

Soon I was the only person still standing

At the lake’s edge A man made lonely

By such beauty

 
A man with less than perfect faith in any God.

 

from Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems.

Harper:

New York

, 1994