Scissor, Paper

Posted by Dave Bonta on November 24, 2006 (last modified at 9:09 am, 11/24/06)

It started with angels:
a chain gang, joined
at the wings.
Or children holding hands,
their blank faces
& androgynous bodies
ready for the magic
of markers. Seven
to eight, it seems,
was the Age of Paper.
In the lunchroom,
older boys passed on
the lore of cootie catchers
& diamond-shaped
footballs folded
from a notebook page.
Back in class,
we made snowflakes
& taped them to the high
classroom windows,
bait for the gods of snow
& early dismissal.
In December, we draped
the blackboard & doorway
with Christmas chains,
red linked with green
linked with red,
& come February, learned
the simplest cut of all:
the craft-paper heart.
This time, though green
might’ve seemed more apt,
only red would do.
The teacher showed us
how to turn them into cards
with the addition of
a recipient’s name
on the outside
& some simple message
hidden in the fold, making
a virtue of the necessary,
indelible crease.

Filed in Poems & poem-like things. Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.Print Print

9 Responses to Scissor, Paper

  1. Fred Garber says:
    November 24, 2006 at 9:48 am

    Dave …your poem brought back memories of my own lame attempts to make stuff out of paper. My paper airplanes always flew straight to the floor and my paper dolls were always horribly disfigured!

    Reply
  2. robin andrea says:
    November 24, 2006 at 12:12 pm

    Dave– This is a wonderful poem. I like it so much. I was just remembering these same rituals the other day, when pumpkins and witches adorned neighborhood windows, in celebration of that orange and black holiday. It is a lovely bit of enculturation that takes place with these paper cut-outs in our elementary school classrooms. Sometimes, even at that age, we experience our first heartbreaks, too, when we hand off our creased red construction paper hearts with their “roses are red…” to the subject of our affections, but do not get one in return. Third grade old maid!

    Reply
  3. marja-leena says:
    November 24, 2006 at 5:12 pm

    A real memory trigger! As a grandmother, I’ve been enjoying another generation of paper cutouts glued to windows, images varying with the seasons and special occasions. Right now I’m looking forward to my youngest daughter’s very special and intricate snowflakes, scattered all over the black-mirrored windows, bringing the light of snow indoors.

    Reply
  4. Larry Ayers says:
    November 24, 2006 at 11:20 pm

    “… the magic of markers” tickled me, and the “necessary, indelible crease” was a perfect image for the end of the poem, with its implication that the technique used can’t be hidden.

    Reply
  5. Brett says:
    November 25, 2006 at 8:51 am

    Oh my goodness, yes. This is about the age when I started collecting those colorful books with disembodied hands doing origami, step by step. I go through reams of paper nowadays but seem to have forgotten that it is a plastic medium in its own right.

    Reply
  6. Zhoen says:
    November 25, 2006 at 10:17 am

    Valentine’s Day craft time was my only moment of popularity, because I could cut a good heart, with fold.

    When I took anatomy in college, a decade later, I could draw real hearts pretty well, and enjoyed the change from dogmatism to observable data.

    Never want to do cardiac surgery, it’s boring, just a pump in that context. It’s interest lies in it’s subtle endocrine funtion. But it’s the stomach that has a brain.

    Reply
  7. Dave says:
    November 25, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    Fred- Paper airplanes would be another whole post, I guess. I was always half-decent at those.

    r.a. – Glad you liked. I guess we did paper things for halloween and thanksgiving, too – hand turkeys, pilgrim hats and the like. As for Valentine’s Day, I know I had my first crush in 2nd grade. But the teachers always made sure that everyone gave valentines to everyone else of the opposite gender, so I don’t remember if there were any broken hearts arond that.

    marja-leena – Of course, some people persist in making paper cut-outs well into adulthood. I know an artist who specializes in it. Her stuff is amazing. It wouldn’t be my choice, though since I rather prefer asymmetry.

    Larry – Thanks. I was kind of pleased with those two phrases, as well, even if the rest of the poem was a bit prosaic for my tastes.

    Brett – Origami, eh? You must’ve been more advanced than me (or had more inventive teachers). Unless you’re counting paper airplanes!

    Zhoen – Great comment. I agree that observable reality trumps symbolism every time. I wouldn’t mind hearing more about that “subtle endocrine function” sometime.

    Reply
  8. rr says:
    November 26, 2006 at 4:59 pm

    The only appropriate thing is to leave a stone to complete the trio (and to ask what a cootie is, but I suppose I can google that). (o)

    Reply
  9. Dave says:
    November 26, 2006 at 5:09 pm

    Cooties were like germs, but only girls had them.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

URLs are converted to links, and three or more links in one comment will cause it to be sent to the moderation queue. Constructive criticism is always welcome. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Smorgasblog

    • Metaphors for the Moon
      Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
      of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

    • Cleaning My Attic
      Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

    • Clumps and Voids
      The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

    • botanizing
      On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

    • The Twitching Line
      My uncle, gutting a fish:
      removing the fins from either side,
      tipping the knife below

      the little anus, pointing the tail-
      end away, slitting it to the gills,
      then plunging in a hand

      to scoop the organs out, soft
      and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

    • The Ordinary and the Wild
      I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

    • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
      So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

    • Chatoyance
      And on the other side, what I
      set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
      a crease scored in bent blades of grass
      where I forgot the wall stood,
      my footsteps blurring as the
      grass unbends.

    • Velveteen Rabbi
      There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

    • Will Buckingham
      My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

  • Read more (Archives)

    Subscribe to Smorgasblog

  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
    — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

`