Fool’s Gold
This morning I love everyone,
even Jerome, the neighbor I hate,
and the sun. And the sun
has pre-warmed my bucket seat
for the drive up Arsenal Street
with the hot car effect,
a phenomenon climatologists
use to explain global warming
to senators and kids.
I love the limited edition
Swingline gold stapler
in the oil change lounge
which can, like a poem,
affix anything to anything
on paper. One sheet of paper,
for instance, for that cloud of gnats,
one for this lady’s pit mix
wagging his tail so violently
I fear he’ll hurt his hips.
One sheet for glittered lip balm,
for eye contact, Bitcoin extortion
and the imperfect tense.
Sheets for each unfulfilled wish
I left in a penny in a mall fountain.
Sun spills into the lounge
through the window decal
in geometric Tetris wedges.
I have a sheet for Tetris,
its random sequence of pieces
falling toward me in this well
like color coded aspects of the life
I neglected to live, for the pleasure
of making line after line
disappear. The gold stapler
has twenty-sheet capacity
so I straighten my stack
on the reception counter
and staple the day together
with an echoing chunk.
Copyright © 2020 by Ted Mathys. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 31, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is part of a series that explores family life, politics, and history through a unifying metaphor of the pursuit of gold. From the era of Spanish conquest to the present, gold is part of the story of American land, power, and resource extraction, a figure for capitalist accumulation and ostentation. But gold is also a durable cultural ideal found in wedding rings, chintzy staplers, edible gold flakes that are purported to have medicinal qualities. Gold is a contradiction, both a curse and a cure. And fool’s gold—iron pyrite—seems to operate the way that poems do, offering a virtual expression of the unattainable, a signature of pure experience.”
—Ted Mathys
Ted Mathys
