American Life in Poetry: “Lessons” by Vanessa Stauffer

This column is more than 10 years old and I’ve finally gotten around to trying a little origami! Here’s a poem about that, and about a good deal more than that, by Vanessa Stauffer, who teaches writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Lessons

To crease a sheet of paper is to change

its memory, says the origami

master: what was a field of snow

folded into flake. A crane, erect,

structured from surface. A tree

emerges from a leaf – each form undone

reveals the seams, pressed

with ruler’s edge. Some figures take

hundreds to be shaped, crossed

& doubled over, the sheet bound

to its making – a web of scars

that maps a body out of space,

how I fashion memory: idling

at an intersection next to Jack Yates High,

an hour past the bell, I saw a girl

fold herself in half to slip beneath

the busted chain-link, books thrust

ahead, splayed on asphalt broiling

in Houston sun. What memory

will she retain? Her cindered palms,

the scraped shin? Braids brushing

the dirt? The white kite of her homework

taking flight? Finding herself

locked out, or being made

to break herself in.

Poem copyright 2015 by Vanessa Stauffer from “third coast” (Winter, 2015) and reprinted by permission of the author and publisher. American Life in Poetry is supported by the Poetry Foundation and the English departement at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We do not accept unsolicited submissions.