I rummage, looking for something I lost.
—Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons”
Laminated is a strong word for the condition of this poem. On a rearranged wall behind me, it is printer paper held to rosy cutout, decorative sheets purchased for less than a quarter at the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse. I have not entered those walls in years, but the destination remains one of my favorites, all piano-shaped buttons and cornflower fabric scraps and monochromatic portraits of strangers with dates scrawled on their backs. Paper petals exhumed from bins and carried for years form a frame to these recycled words, and packing tape bestows them with shimmer. Li-Young Lee’s lines are free from air bubbles under sticky Scotch.
I am author to these poems only by outline, office supply, and impulse in brief moments of freedom after class. Only weeks ago, the regular campus pathway defining my escape from the Humanities building was strangely interrupted by seemingly empty space. A single red brick had disappeared or achromatized into only a brick-shaped clear prism that could not assure me of its weight bearing. I skipped around it but watched for a moment to see if anyone met the translucent solid. Was it glass? Ice? Plastic? A pool so clear even the to- and from- class bustle could not disturb its waters? It ebbed from my attention span, and library printers gave me “Persimmons,” “Afternoon on a Hill” and “Vita Nova.”
Sorry I haven’t written sooner but I’ve been so busy.
—Unnamed sender, postcard from Oakland, MD
To the left of Persimmons trickles this Blackwater Falls postcard. I’ve only been to those obsidian waters once or twice, maybe as many times as I’ve been to Smokehole Caverns (once or twice). Anywhere else, you might call these tourist spots, but Mount Storm, West Virginia, doesn’t draw many visitors. Truthfully, neither geographic feature is located in Mount Storm, but they are close enough that in my hometown, we called them ours, far enough that we could visit them and call it a field trip or a day out, picking and choosing distance at will. I don’t remember much about the first time I went except for carrying a gift-store beanie puppy across bridges and splintered railing condensation, trailing heathered fur with my gaze to opaque ripples below.
The postcard is not addressed to me. It’s an Oakland, Maryland antique store find, yellowed paper folded square with waters embossed in one section to unravel into something much larger than you might expect. It follows me wherever I go to sleep at night—the green house close enough to call charcoal waters my neighbor, first apartment upon moving to the other rhododendron state, tacked inches from my face by my low-hanging twin bed in my first college dorm room, against slanted construction at the top of the blue house on the intersection of Jersey and Myrtle. In that final place, it remained taped shut on the sloped surface above my bed, the shape of the room inconsistent with solid definition as either wall or ceiling. But where I am now, beside Li-Young Lee and displayed bookmarks too colorful to conceal by their original purpose, it runs parallel to the headboard of a now-shared full bed.
On the inside is an undated letter to “Pat.” I look at it now, its first time vertical, and the waterfall runs more blue-green than black. A friend from home texted me last week with the latest local drama, invoking what outline I have of the place in memory. A classmate we’ve known since preschool had allowed a little girl to hold her two-week-old honey lab puppy at the blue-black falls on that postcard, but they stood close enough to a cliff that when the girl lost her grip, the dog went tumbling, rock over rock, invisible to the bridges above. No one knew what came of the puppy. I can only imagine how furry echo gave way to headrush, frantic eyes searching the yellowed foam and crags below. Letterpress dimples stare back at me now, as if the postcard, too, has fallen upon something it must rearrange itself around.
This page is so big it’s kind of intimidating, but what’s not is you.
—Mia, first love letter
On the nightstand below these mementos, a salt lamp and a potted plant with kiwi-fuzz limbs grip, together, several letters from my girlfriend. One card marks the front of this tucked stationary: a Valentine’s Day image of a boy and a girl who look a little like a lesbian couple, this one lacking a stamp, handed instead to me in person to make the date. She’d managed to get access to the color printer at the bank even before the rest of her coworkers knew how, resulting in flimsy pixels of watercolor that make surrounding grass seem to fade into waves, the couple content on an island. Mia adhered the image to a cutout portion of a folder, opalescent ink swirling with glue and resting placid on cardstock. Her blue handwriting pools over one extra layer for durability.
When I first hung the card up in that blue house, I ran out of putty. My solution was to take two thumbtacks and string a shoelace at that awkward meeting of wall and ceiling, beginning of slope. There, the card dangled from miniature clothespins, free to sway lighter than ever with an open window or shoulder brush.
But here, the corners evaporate ever so slightly, hugged with the rest between lamp and pot, absorbing Himalayan pink glow in movement not yet sure of itself. On the cluttered nightstand in the bedroom where some of those letters were written, wide-ruled paper in a stamped envelope holds the back of the stack, dated with a subtle smear: December 10th, 2019. A record of the first time she confessed to falling in love. It is punctured twelve times, loose holes worn by thumbtacks where it had been pinned again and again, having periodically fallen under the weight of weeks. I always rushed to put it back up, unwilling to miss any drip of material comfort when sleeping alone.
*
The wall behind me is straight, a single-story bedroom. In that blue house on Jersey and Myrtle, paper fragments insulated the rain-pattered roof within view from my head on the pillow, combination of wall and ceiling making a trapezoid on either side of the room. In recent weeks, they are the things I pulled from tacks, putty left in corners, stuffed in pockets between packing jeans to quarantine in the home of my girlfriend, U-Hauling by the light of global pandemic. My dyed hair leaves a lilac imprint on the pillow beside hers, and inked notes percolate my new half of the room as they did the narrowest channels of half-zipped bags.
Everything is at a new angle lately.