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 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.

The Oldest Garden in the World

by Elizabeth Willis

Something drives out
from the fate I was hungry for.
A body that fulfills its face
carries into day
what fades behind it.
In Natural History
Sophocles loved
Asphodel, but Asphodel
loved William Carlos
Williams as hyacinth
loved France, and honey
loves a toothache.
Is that a crime
or just a form of currency
like big tobacco, moving on
with shady radar
over our greenery?

The Power

by Paul Farley

Forget all of that end-of-the pier

palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town

in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells

and raise the lid of the world to change the light,

then go as far as you want: the ornament

of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,

the weak grip of a crane in the arcades

you’ve built, ballrooms to come alive at night,

then a million-starling roost, an opulent

crumbling like cake icing…

Now, bring it down

in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,

that knows the spectral blues; that always starts

in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling

in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings

marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume

of black smoke high enough to stain the halls

of clouds. Now look around your tiny room

And tell me that you haven’t got the power.

Alcove

by John Ashbery

Is it possible that spring could be

once more approaching? We forget each time

what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,

adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump

of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,

and the whole point of its being spring collapse

like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though,

you have to say that for it.

And should further seasons coagulate

into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,

who’s to say we weren’t provident? We indeed

looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,

catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night

in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.

But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen

daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.