This is a love of language.
For all poets, Pound says--
Ezra Pound-- says that the poet is the keeper
of the language of the tribe.
And yet language is so imperfect.
There's a mention in this poem about the Sumerian tablets,
which many of you will know were discovered in Sumeria
by the thousands-- heaps, mounds of them.
And the scholars were excited because it
was the oldest records we really have of the past,
if we could just translate them.
But for a long time, they couldn't translate them.
It's called "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 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 express.
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 12 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."