Epigraphy

Juncos emboss the soft ice-crust beneath the feeder
with their footfall. It’d be wrong to read their marks
as runes, but (since I’ll make meaning from the most
unlikely things—someone else’s cast-off grocery list,
vanadium, my scarred skin, a toy dinosaur) I try, and
fail. The juncos step lightly—much more lightly than
these words piling up at my fingertips; in the time it
takes me to fail, they’ve come, and written, and gone.