Ode to Shoes.(Poem)

 
ODE TO SHOES 
for Carol Jenkins 
 
   You are the machinery that conveys us to the world. 
   You speak a language we all know: the dumbed-down shape, 
   the well-worn sole, the made to last. 
 
   You are not just figure in a landscape: kitsch or camp, 
   you flaunt your rhetoric in our mind's eye; red or white, 
   denote desire, thick or thin, you see us through. 
 
   Some of you aspire to be kind: 
   the Middle Kingdom's butterfly 
   (the lotus blossom stands aside). 
 
   Hiroshige's horses, like their owners, 
   wait in footwear made of straw. The sky is red. 
   Spitting in a sandal made of straw and calling spirits of the dead 
   will bring them back. Or so it's said. 
 
   The living, too, like words, have ghosts that colonise the mind. 
   Sabots, your attitude is clear 
   the moment you walk in the door. 
 
   Shoes! You bring your messengers hot foot. 
   How many toes have journeyed in you round the globe? 
   Flotillas form in corridors of hotel rooms; 
   you buddy up at temples and at mosques, 
   and practise patience outside sliding paper walls. 
   You nudge each other under beds. 
 
   You fit yourself to what is in 
   and what is out of style, including feet. 
   You wrap yourself in plastic clouds 
   in labs and surgeries and wards. You walk on air. 
 
   No matter that the world is full of others just like you, 
   We call you ours. 
   You dog our steps. 
   You clog our thoughts. 
 
   The place we found you never leaves us. 
   You keep us a step away from what 
   the grass seed understands. 
   You pinch us tight, lest we forget. 
 
   How many personalities do you assign to us? 
   What selves are in our closets or at large among the world? 
 
   What is it that your many tongues are trying to relate? 
   Comic objects, why ...