{ giraffes are this / desire in the dark. }

[delga]

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

--

The Washer.
by M.

Every time I think the wash cycle is done,
I hear the machine start to spin furiously,
shaking the floors and the walls.
It wants to be done with work, I think;
it wants to bring down the house.
It tried in vain to end its life,
but we found a machine man,
a man who knows mechanicals and
their temperamental meanderings,
and he cut out from the gut
the long protruding shank with which
the washer tried to end its woe.

Which is the long way of saying: laundry day.