Seeding an Alphabet

To invent the alef-beit, decipher the grammar of crows, read a tangle of bare branches with vowels of the last leaves scrawling their jittery speech on the sky’s pale page. Choose a beginning. See what God yields and dirt cedes when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage, when your hand dips grain from a sack, scattering it among engraved furrows. Beyond the hill, a plume of dust where oxen track the hours. Does God lead or follow or scout? To answer, count to one again and again: a red maple leaf and a yellow maple leaf that wind rifles and rain shines until they let go, blazing their scripted nothingness on air.