Dictionaries, especially old ones
that smell of musty shelves.
Mine was once my mother's—

held all the words of her life,
alongside those of everyone
she knew or never met.

Without algorithm, they spread
before her in waves of possibility,
oceans alive with meaning, definitions

fluid, changed with every reading,
nuanced, complicated, sprawling
across her nine decades.

I remember how she taught me,
night after night, in slowly turning
pages, first to read, then to swim.