Ted Mathys

FLUENCIES

I am a person
on whom nothing is lost.
By whom it’s been lost,
the nothing, I’m unsure.
Like a suntan it just
appeared on my arms.
Now I carry nothing
beneath my routine.
When I place a cabbage
in the shopping cart
nothing mimics the gesture.
Nothing sleeps as I sleep.
I never ask after its owner
because nothing is an echo
that will, given time,
reinfect the source. 

✦

She gave me
the cold shoulder.
I cradled it in my palms
like an ostrich egg.
I knew I was to protect it
until she gave the word.
When she gave the word
I placed the word
along with the shoulder
in a small cooler
with an ice pack
and took it to the pier
jutting into the lake.
I removed my feet
from my shoes,
the shoulder from its cooler.
I let the sun go to work
but kept the word on ice.

✦

I jumped the gun
I found in a cornfield.
Winchester lever-action
rifle with wooden stock,
it rested in a furrow
between shorn stalks.
I got a running start
and when I leapt
I saw in the distance
a scarecrow, mouth sewn
into disfigurement,
staring back.

  ✦

I threw my voice
in a tight spiral
from my spot on the field
toward an older man,
a version of myself
idle in the end zone,
hands in the air.
My voice arced
over fresh cut turf,
its spinning laces
speaking in tongues.
He caught the answer
to a question I lack
the language to ask. 

✦

I ran out of time
to say what I meant
so kept running
until I entered
a vacant space
faceted by blue light.
It was once a parlor
where moods were kept.
Solemnity, irreverence,
sadness, too.
I searched for self-
delusion, as if it were
a mood and not,
as I knew, a condition.
But the parlor
had been swept clear
into mineral-blue
absorbing distance.

TED MATHYS is the author of four books of poetry including, most recently, Gold Cure (Coffee House Press, 2020). A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America, he lives in Saint Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University.