The Staples Stay

Across the street from our local hardware store stands a wooden power pole that the whole neighborhood uses as a bulletin board. People staple up flyers for lost cats, yard sales, guitar lessons, and rooms for rent. The flyers come down after a week or two, or the rain takes them. The staples stay.

After years of this, the pole is covered in them. Some are bright and new, most have rusted to the color of the wood. Some went in straight, some got bent over when someone pulled a flyer off, some are only half driven. Between them are a few roofing nails, a thumbtack head, a screw. Someone stapled a strip of tape around the pole that says "Please post no bills." It is held up by staples too.

I kept looking at the pattern. Completely random, nobody planned it. Each staple is one person putting up one message, and the message is gone. What is left is the record that somebody had something to say.

This piece is built from layered cardboard, coated dark, with the corrugated edges facing out so the surface reads like the grain of the old pole. Down the middle runs a lighter band, and that is where the staples go. At the top they are sparse and set as small crosses. Lower down they get denser and more scattered, bent at different angles, the way they pile up on the pole at the height where people can reach.

Near the top, the form steps in and leaves a ledge, and a stone sits on it.