all those ancestors, not in the past
but ahead of us, I thought for years
my task was to bring them books & ink & words
to be their hands their script their unfamiliar live-oak
trees and fractal shoreline to make human-sized
pages legible for them to take up residence
in the arboreal gaps that English cannot reach
and all along they were teaching me to unwrite
to hear their book of crows mazed in updrafts
where blue jays scuffle imitating hawks
their dictionary of bread, sound of water falling
or snow dying into branches the color of sparrows
the pronomials they he she no one swim into wetlands
as I sit with my mother speaking, not speaking
her teeth blacken, then unblacken like tidal wash

Meredith Stricker

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