“SIGNS AND SIGNALS” by William Welch

Given—something is always missing— 

When I was twelve, I tried to teach myself
how to write Egyptian hieroglyphs, 

though the book I copied from said nothing
about Coptic, or how Champollion deciphered 

the Rosetta Stone. It didn’t tell me that, 
like Hebrew, the written language of Kemet is an abjad—

it lacks vowels. This was before I learned
the value of my father’s advice, before my foibles…

I was one of those awkward teens. One day he said, 
“you have to find someone who’s for you…”

a Delphic statement, I thought, taking it in fatalistic terms.
As a preposition, for has twelve distinct connotations,

and he left the choice of which he meant up to me…
It was a flawed attempt at communication,

those few, fraught sentences I wrote with hawks and baskets. 
They meant nothing. Even I couldn’t read them

after I set my pen down. What I wrote could only be written
once. I remembered all of this that afternoon we spent 

in Cherry Valley, visiting the swaybacked shed 
where Samuel Morse composed his dots and dashes…

It was long ago turned into a used bookstore, 
full of antique manuals, dusty paperbacks, maps 

of the town during the colonial period. One reminds us
there was a massacre here in November, 1778.

I opened a leather-bound volume of math problems—“algebra, 
distant cousin of the zebra,” you said, looking over my shoulder. 

We both tried to solve one of the equations,
a classic search for X, which balanced with Y. 

We looked out a window, its glass so old 
that it seemed like it was raining, and pictured

Morse sitting there, convinced he had his code at last,
clear—concise, like the best, the barest language…

Anyone who knew his code could read the message…
Now, it’s forgotten. Reduced to a private breakthrough.

And we, with our own signs and signals, devised
as we go along, know this decipherment is guesswork,

endless—like trying to tie knots in a rope made of water—

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