Steven Salmoni
From A Theory of Paper
1

p is a vessel of the world, but q asks how its passage might have reached the world.


The letters formed the universe to follow what their book would not contain. What letter, then, is the mark of any that have ever been?


“Let us remember” is not a sign of letters, but only their circumstance, their conjunction.


It’s the impression one gets, when one explains the letter, in order to read the letter.


Look at how you dream, enraptured in the flow of the opened room. Where it was a matter, against the matter of the “are you here,”


the line, brushed, spontaneous, hoping to establish some ground where we might claim some answers, where such answers might be sustained.


Implicit in what follows, the space that follows,


if only at that moment, will suffice. I am thinking of a situation. Answers must come, no matter that the answer will become us.

Steven Salmoni
From A Theory of Paper
2

As the letter tries to change itself, see where it freezes, like a static letter, but unlike any you have pronounced before.


The letter can equally be mine and yours, beyond any art that would compare or make them common.


A leaf, with trees that are inseparable. . .


What letter would begin this page, without ever returning? Is p just another’s monument to the propensity of p?


“Where,” replies q, “does the unbroken meet the want of its duration?”


Where the picture of the letter depends upon the letter? Where the letters salvage whatever they can gather?


The space in the letter shows the blank within the letter, like one’s mind shows itself without the mind.


Or, “dripping from the north side of the northern stone, the letter is the hardiest of tears.”


Troubled by everything, the letter is the myth beneath my house.


The letter made the outline of the wall and the outline of the broken star. Through illusions we have blossomed.


“Letter of the island or island of the sudden rain?” Will the letter draw a motion that will turn upon the arc which extends beyond its reach?


If the letter seems uncertain, it is not because I read standing above letters traced in sand.


The first wound is said to be the wrong letter.


“Winter came. Breaking the storm the letter was written, from lotus to white mountains.”


The sky is the obstacle upon which the letter, unrecognized, will break. But the letter’s edge unfolds its dream, as a sky ready to cover any ground.

Steven Salmoni
From A Theory of Paper
3

It may be, however, that q marks the distance through which one letter cannot read another.


(Can it be that some thoughts were not allowed their wording?)


The pages of the book support the whole, as if one could preserve it. When the provisions of the sun begin to speak, the mountains’ ridge can be unlettered.


The paper learned the letters in such a way that is forever embedded in their arc. p is anchored to the page wherever one would have good reason.


But where is the person in the letter not apparent to the letter?


It is plain, the light is clear, and more letters have gone missing.


All the same, some want a letter that would lower others to the ground.


Lines represent gravel; the letter takes the other hand. Where does p represent ladder, and where does p expand the world?


Fingers must be letters, as the margin is called at times to be.


Previously, there were only items for the continuation of the second. A method of “latitude over time.” The string of letters claims only what they answer.


Persistence is the use of letters after the series; the letter, the intent to walk away. (Which way encodes us?)


They resemble strings, unanchored evidence of anything that exists or that has never been.


“Otherwise,” said q, “I’d infer the rupture of all rationale.”


Let’s say that letters read themselves. They see what no one could have added.


It may be the line that proves this remainder, pressed together with the same fractioning of pebbles, points, imprints, etc.


The world weighs letters when introducing form. p may be the will, letter p between the pebbles, a single point of transfer from the body to itself. To express things, from time to time.


Not “there, which is not.” Some attach before the point, and some come after.

Steven Salmoni
From A Theory of Paper
4

p will have its value, or, when omitted, represent omission, instead of p.


I cannot attach any weight. My work was to put upon the roving pair. Letters, in the place of hours – I gave them sugar-plums, a parcel of conundrums.


We are too close to letters; there are too many, and they all talk at once. They know what they were helpless to avoid; the desire of their lives has been ratified, if only as “something else that’s happened.” Their angularity is notorious. In this character, we read, a tendency, though nothing more.


Then again, the natural won’t do. If the answer would be “yes” in general, the question begs the question of what the affirmative is supposed to mean,


of that which goes beyond that which comes after. “All one wants is to get to the point, where there is no one word for common.” Each will get a fraction, but there are no two ways of determining the fraction,


given only fingers or pebbles, to distinguish expressible from inexpressible letters. As if there were a table, for all refractions of the “who will lead us?” Proved by being, emplaced in such and such a series, named only in the nomenclature of the same. (And failing this passage, how many lines and how many pebbles?) The surface where our lines were drawn, and a surface strewn with sand.

Steven Salmoni
From A Theory of Paper
5

Willow alphabet, arterial book. “What space referred to thing.”


“Before the letter” was a spacious vault, all interiors made to be alike, where nature’s transformations didn’t use the alphabet.


As the letters show how the others bend, how their composition first allowed language to know the alphabet, material to its own material.


The shape of paper was found in paper. “As the sun begins to speak, as when each sun is lettered.”


The letters that only learned the sun are now astonished at the wide-framed paper road in which they’ve been embedded.


p walks upon the surface, the one idea from which it came.


p is to q, as q is to “the space where one has not approached another.”


Falling towards the horizon, the sun must at least align with the standing trees, just enough so that we have time to see.


It’s how we appeared, temporarily, or in between.


Must delivery be cumulative?


Deliquescent space, in-spiraled space, circle these words where the letters are soft.


Someone, draw an arch upon the wall, and a way to go, any time it lets us through.