It didn’t take a lot of staring
at the alphabet embroidered
in a frame on the wall
of a doctor’s waiting room
in letters round and straight, blue and orange,
before that cryptogram
began to look like a word in itself,
one long crush of sound and sense,
impossible to pronounce or comprehend.
Was this then the very first word
uttered by some god of language
in a yawp that later would be combined
into all the words we know,
the shorter ones we see every day
whether in a magazine or a poem by Amy Lowell?
But there’s the nurse at the door
calling William, making me officially next,
and somehow reminding me
that the letters are there in order
for children lined up in school
to sing the notes of every letter
in a chorus of vowels and consonants,
or for you to say backwards
as you stand in the rain by your ticking car,
halted by the law in your rush to get from A to B.