Iron over Waxed Paper

This is what language can do

When language is playing nice—

Say you remember a book

You made for a class project

When you were small, only eight,

And your family had just moved

Into a house in the woods.

The book was a book of leaves

You collected with mom’s help

And checked against a guidebook.

You remember how it felt

Strange to learn oaks came in kinds—

Black oak, pin oak, and white oak—

You can still see the careful

Lettering under each one.

But your memory cluster

Left out a complex detail,

A sensory memory

You didn’t know was in there,

Until you read someone else

Who recalled gathering leaves

And putting them in a book—

Pushed the hot iron over

The waxed paper so they’d stick—

And those few words jolt your thoughts.

The smell of the waxed paper,

The feel of leaves glued to it,

The menace of that iron,

The whole awkward procedure,

The entire sensorium

Surfaces out of the depths,

Like some bog-body mummy

With its eyelashes intact,

Lifted straight out of lost past.

That. Language can do like that,

Like scents can, but more exact.

When you were younger, you read

To mangle your memories,

Try to imagine some world

Through them that you’d never sensed.

But now you’re old and happy

For a small excavation

Of what’s buried in your brain,

Worm-lit by faint synapses,

Salvage archaeology,

One meter square of one day.