Rock Paper Scissors

                        Midnight snow swirls in the courtyard—
                                    you wake and mark the steel-gray light of dawn,

                                                the rhythm in your hands
                                                of scissors cutting paper;

                        you pull a blade against ribbon,
                                    and the ribbon springs into a spiraling curl 
                                                            when you release it;

                        here, no one pulled a blade against the ribbon of desire,
                                    a downy woodpecker drilled into a desiccated pear tree; 

                        you consider how paper wraps rock,
                                                            scissors snips paper,

                        how this game embodies the evolution
                                                            of bacteria and antibiotic;

                        you can’t see your fingerprints on a door handle,
                                    but your smudging,

                                                            like trudging footprints in snow,

                        track where and how you go—

                                                wrapping
                                                a chrysoprase heart in a box—

                        how you look at a series of incidentals
                                                and pull an invisible thread through them all.

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“This poem emerged out of a mysterious seed. I watched snowfall and suddenly had a sensation of scissors cutting paper. In the way that the simple but enduring child’s game connects ‘rock,’ ‘paper,’ and ‘scissors,’ I tried to formally use stanzaic clusters to reveal interlocking configurations of consciousness.”
—Arthur Sze