Now take my measure, measure-man,
and open the old dry goods store on Blake Avenue
the one on the corner, the old man spoke no English
festoons of rickrack yarn ribbon my mother
understood these arid mysteries
                                                                     I waited
in the shadows of language
I will never understand I will never speak
I have studied Latin Greek German
French Italian Spanish Welsh
Sanskrit Hebrew Chinese Tibetan
and can barely speak English
when someone calls me
because speaking means having to say

means having something to say
to the man in the shadows
the dry old man among tape measures
his yardstick nailed to the edge of the counter
his cutter his shears the accurate his patterns

o God there is a pattern
the blue sky is over me now
white clouds sailing my way over mountains

there is a pattern
I will never understand
and I had nothing to say to the old man
to the cloth, what word mattered?
nothing to say to the Murtha girls
waiting for the bus with me at our corner,
to their pink voluptuous flesh
what word mattered?

what word does the body need
in its immeasurable completeness?
and what did their clean sweet Catholic minds
need of my language?
the blue smoke of my longings and my
red passion
                          to remake the endless
structures of the whole world
without damaging, green me, a single leaf?

o God I had nothing to say to them
and the habit patterns of sentences
dried on my tongue
Use This Word In An Ordinary Sentence

Not even fear could let me speak
when the crinkly brown Simplicity patterns
lay strewn over the dining room floor
and my mother was darting pins in and out of blue fabric
and roses of wallpaper climbed the pale plaster
and the piano rumbled in my aunt’s parlor
under the stride of Uncle Joe’s barrelhouse
and the crucifixes glowered down over my coming and goings

and no pattern I could form with all the words I knew
o God how many words I knew
would ever mean anything when I actually said it,
I am afraid of the crucifix I said
they laughed, pushed me up the hall past it
or I asked what is sufficient to the day like Jesus says?
and they shook their heads and rubbed my hair
yet these were their words, not mine,
I had none of my own,
it was their sentences
I was giving back to them,
these aliens of my mother tongue,

I tried to find the key to their
hearts, the dry mysteries their juicy bodies
I looked in their books but my own
heart and my body
never had anything to say.

 

 

Close to the new—

the tenderness,

the smell of leather

lavender

rose

            you are my mother too,

we are born

from all we perceive,

fully born, I mean,

it takes so many years.

 

Walk out of the sea at last.

Blow a tarnished silver horn in your mother’s
garden.

Sometimes it is wise to open the door.

Open the door and just stand there sleepily
alert.  Not waiting!

The trees have been whispering  their secrets
all winter long with their alphabet of
branches, now fall silent, blushing with leaves
in green embarrassment.

The ice is almost all melted now.  And all the
gouges and scratches and skate scars on its
surface have dissolved into the pond.  Year
after year!  No wonder water is so wise.

But sometimes it’s all right to wait–just make
sure you’re not waiting for someone, not even
me (whoever I am).

No wonder we get tired after two-thirds of a
day– at every moment we are on a road that
forks in front of us, every breath brings new
choices. Haven’t you ever wondered why we
need so much sleep?

Any sentence that begins with “I” can’t tell the
whole story.  But it tries.

Read the signs:  blue sky, shapely small cloud
over tall spruce.  I think that’s its name.

Sometimes you feel you’re walking through a
dreamy empty city like Berlin, not too many
towers, lots of skies, wide streets, everything
safely in another language.

They say that Connecticut is named for its
river, its Indian name, that meant it flows
both ways at once–estuarial, obviously, like
the Hudson (whose Indian name had the same

meaning). The river flowing south as the tide
flows north.  Nothing natural can ever finally
make up its mind.

There’s a hill I know up in New Lebanon where
you can stand with one foot in New York and
one in Connecticut. Face north and your left
foot will be in a sort of Sufi monastery
downhill. God knows what your right foot
believes.

Everything happens at once.  How could it be
otherwise.

I never met my grandfathers, both were dead
before I was born. My mother’s father in the
one photo I have of him looked a lot like
Wallace Stevens.  I never met him either, but
he taught me most of what I know, though
you’d never know it.  But it’s what I mean
when I say Connecticut, speaking of what
words mean.

I think there is a temple on the other side of
anything, a sacred spacious building where

true god is served.  To find god go, to the other
side.

I love it that we have borders and frontiers,
especially the kind between states, real
frontiers you can cross freely, nobody
noticing except something deep inside you
that knows, that always knows.

It has connect in it, of course, and cut. Does it
mean cut all connection, dwell in sublime
isolation?  Or should we be wise and ordinary
(the ordinary is always wise) and read it in
English:  connect the cut, span the gap, heal
the wound, make the skin of our lives whole
again.

Stevens at the end wrote about rocks, the
rocks of his place. We belong to the stones of
our town, our glacial boulders turned up in
our fields.  How could we live so long if we
weren’t part stone?

Slim hips of Connecticut wading in the Sound,
across from my own island.  Grandfather
owned a little chunk of it but I left home.

So when I say or I sing come out of the
shallows to me do I have to have someone in
mind?

Why can’t we all just sing?

Heal me with your song–
every woman a wizard, every man a sage.  Just
open your lips, let your breath do all the rest.

28 April 2020

                                       

drive a truck through Kansas

why don’t you remember

isn’t dawn animal enough?

Casual, leaning on a maple tree

you watch the myriad

can’t it be me? 

                                   Am I

the only one to be only?

Kansas again, a cushion

below your heels, gradual

erosion of the peneplane

 

somebody’s birthday every day

give a kid a drone for Xmas

all a child ever wants to see

is whatever isn’t there,

it takes a lot of growing up

to take an interest in being here,

landscape of the moment,

 

or was it a birch tree  I meant,

the white one, you write on its bark,

childhood has its advantages

try to remember them

it’s only time gets in your way

the necrology of feelings

scribbled in a thousand sonnets

 

why did I get up so early

was I trying to catch the snow at work

before it sneaked away

or took the El back to 1950

girl on the platform bla bla bla

a poster to show how she should be,

a wall is to lean on like a tree

or was it a lamp post in London

an outcrop near Laramie?

 

You’ve got to lean on something

it’s like carrying your bed with you

snug under the covers as you go

dreaming on your feet

like a batter waiting for the pitch

flexing muscles you don’t have

dreaming images you can’t see

but still,

                         but still,

do it while you can, some

other lad will take up the thread

the tale, or lass, or let me

know how I can help

I used to know how.

 

2.

So that’s what the pre-dawn glisten

of streetlights said on the wet road

I think I was the only one awake

to hear it, but you never know—

the woods are full of listeners

what else is a tree for

they bear witness

 tell all that they have heard

since they planted us on earth

but we’re seldom smart enough to heed them

and for God’s sake how do you heed a tree?

that’s what they should teach in schools,

they teach us to listen

but to the wrong characters,

they should instruct us instead

on how to hear trees and listen to stones

then Bach would come back in all of us,

most of what I know

comes from hearing the church walls talk

after the hymns finally stop,

just sat in the light and listened.

 

 

3.

So why do I talk so much

my kind wife wonders

at breakfast especially

that long-awaited brunch

when the sun if any is high,

I talk and keep saying listen

Listen to the glisten I say

and she looks at me quietly

and wonders why I

of all people can’t hear what I’m saying.

But saying wants to be said,

o fearsome judge, saying

is what the stone does

and can’t I be shale a while

like the rock ledge in the back yard,

can’t I listen by speaking,

that’s what I’m trying to say

now go back to your lox and eggs

and I’ll try to be quiet

at least for a while.

April 25, 2020

 

 

A Tribute to Carolee Schneemann (1939 – 2019)