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Footnotes
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
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7 Footnotes These bards write their winged history in the snow outside my glass doors, hurried marks I can’t interpret: arrows and carrots, vectors and cross-stitch, golf tee impressions and a quick Chinese brush stroke halted half-ideograph. The story starts high up (where else, for birds?) on the left, just a few tracks as though one claw struggled to start this tale, the first bird scripting, the first syllable of flight. The lines continue, rhyming (I can tell by the loose swirl of the circle, the doubling back of the double track), the first epic transcribed from chirping. I follow the trails, which divide in all directions, till the right side of the text ends in penciled chatter. Just now a single scholar lights at the far corner, pecks two annotations, flies away from this collision of imprints, curious bird-yarn, airmailed to my backyard. ...