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.