The manuscript begins with poems sifted from the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls--poems pre-written, gathered into new song. The "speaker" (collective anonymity, a sect) seems to speak from the ruins of the scriptorium, from the archaeological site, from the caves, from the jars within the caves. The physicality of the scrolls, their furled and unfurled form, their being hidden, the remainder that is read out of the absence from which it came, finds parallel meaning in the Kabbalistic notion of the simultaneously revealed and concealed Godhead, or Thou, the addressed. These poems (siftings) are the roots, and the pages that make up the second half of the manuscript are grown from them, rooted in pre-written song--words are imagined as artifacts, ostraca, signatures with roots in the hereafter.