Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Simple Objects  
Gary L. McDowell

On my days off, I fold paper,
fold it tens of times to make the creases
stick, fold it over (and over itself).
My fingers are nimble. 
But all those sleights I spent hours
mastering (cuts, fans, double-lifts,
glides, the tenkai palm) couldn’t prepare me
for the folding, the creasing of cardstock
needed to make paper fly.  My palms
trained to ghost what they held,
my knuckles trained to resist showing strain,
to forgive what pushed against them,
and still I couldn’t crease paper
into unnatural shapes,
into folded flying machines.
It wasn’t about strength, and I knew that.  
It was about subtlety, constraint, timing,
those things like misdirection that take
a lifetime to master. Is life
more than its illusions?
I’ll let someone else answer this,
someone with tonsils and bravado.
(I’ve always found it’s fair,
and usually right, to say, I don’t know).
But I like what I’ve seen, and it’s no illusion
that the beaver behind my childhood church
could hold his breath for nearly an hour,
could hide in his stream,
under his logs, and not show himself
for nearly an hour.  But I knew
he was there, his dark form
shadowed by the sunlight.
He didn’t need to be seen, didn’t need
to hear me tell him lies, tell him
I wouldn’t hurt him.
I only wanted to tell him
that I understood his life, teeth and tail,
that I’d read about him in a book once,
knew that he couldn’t hide
forever. Illusion is tactile, a felt thing,
something one must witness. 
In this way, it’s like sex or youth, death even,
or like flying a folded sheet of paper
across the room. To vanish quarters,
transpose thimbles and silks, produce
cards and ping-pong balls from thin air:
the eroticism of the unexpected:
to cast a shadow with my hands
over silver dollars, move them across the floor,
no strings, no tricks, just muscle memory
and misdirection, the result of obsession,
the reproduction of faith, the gasps
that would follow. I will never fold
anything perfectly. I’ve gone to church
a few times, as a child mostly,
and in Sunday School I learned
that the animals were created when we were created,
and that only the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel.
And so we deceive each other,
pretend to see each other for what we are,
but what we are is never more
than the distance between our heads
and our fingers. And so I fold the paper again,
crease it diagonally, hope that in flight
the pleats will hold, will make of paper
what I can make of shadow,
of a simple object held lightly in my hands.