Unframed Originals by W. S. Merwin

Author:W. S. Merwin [Merwin, W. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640093478
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Hotel

IN a top floor apartment thousands of miles from here, put away out of the light, there is a small collection of yellow postcards, textured like linen in another generation, each of them turning up the same picture, in black and yellow, of a particular hotel in Pittsburgh, and I think of them as mine. Judging from the autos by the curb, the photograph must have been taken shortly after I was born. As far as I know, I have never stayed in that building. There are no x’s marking windows on any of the cards; nothing is written on any of the backs where it says “Message” and “Address.” The cards are indistinguishable from each other, as though they were new, which in a sense they are. One could say that they have not been used, except that my keeping them has been a use, as I see, and one that has grown without my being aware of it, or trying to imagine its beginning or its end.

For seven years, at least, whenever I have found the cards again—usually as I have been packing to leave, or have just come back and have been looking for something else—they have surfaced apparently unchanged. But each time another interval has ended; I have gone and returned. At the sight of the cards it seems to me that I have done neither, yet my hands holding them again have altered; I am wearing different clothes and supposing some later thing. And I have put them away once more, imagining that I am saving them for another use still to come.

I do not remember now just how I acquired them, and yet I can recall some of the pleasure of it. I know I must have discovered them at about the time of the last, or what I took to be the last, of a series of meetings and partings at the building in the center of the photograph: crossings that marked a sequence which I had come to think of as having a peculiar, as yet indecipherable, significance for me. Coincidental, like the later recurrences of those cards blank on the other side.

It may be that I picked them up first, in surprise, from the dark varnished counter in the lobby of the building in the picture, at some time during the weeks following my father’s death. I had occasion to go into that building from time to time, during that indeterminate period, that season, in which many daily occurrences—bare of habit, and taking place in my parents’ city, which had never been mine—reached me as moments unaccountably remembered, drifting in lighted water, voices in public rooms. A small flood of objects claiming to evoke and preserve fragments of incidents, and around them a whole past that I could not recognize, came into my keeping then, in ways that I immediately forgot.

But by the year my father died I would not have recognized the lobby. Size, shape, light, color, detail—it retained no

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