Chaussures à boucles

The Shoe Sonnets

1.	

I take my monk straps to the Petit Palais
Because I tell myself they might make a 
Sarah Bernhardt sound. The streets of Paris 
Have always felt a little bit like a stage refusing 
A curtain, and I am a woman refusing a cure
For my restlessness. At the exhibit, I scream,
Quand même! to an elderly couple blocking 
My view, and they look at me as if I were a troubadour 
With a poorly tuned lyre. But I am a lyre with a poorly tuned
Troubadour. My toes squirm to unstick themselves 
From the insoles of time, and I don’t refuse the hyperbole, 
Not while one of the city’s beige pebbles stutters there, 
Asking for continuity. I am not the same woman I was yesterday. 
We walk to repeat ourselves. We walk to repeat no one. 

2.	

I walk to escape myself, I walk to escape no one, 
Every step a little confirmation, contradiction of the last one. 
The ruins of my feet. The palace of mes pieds. Another language, 
Like another pair of shoes, can save your life. What is worse 
Than someone walking away from you? Someone walking towards. 
With you, I have done both. And wondered if a step can be fatal. 
A step is fantasy. Indivisible carriage. I conjure you coming when 
I hear you coming, you repeating yourself, repeating no one. 
While texting you, I waited for the Dutch family, who did not visit 
The exhibit, to finish at the Sarah Bernhardt photo booth. 
I wanted to take my monk straps in that booth because I wanted to 
Tell myself an obvious lie, to push my unlived lives up into the tendrils 
Of another woman’s vanity. Does our gait tell the truth of our desires? 
Like a sacred beast, I needed to step into the spotlight. 

3.	      
 
Like a sacred beast, I have no use for spotlights, desire is 
Knowing my feet are both fetish and aversion, death an 
Aphrodisiac, and repetition impossible. I have to abide, to let 
The eager lover thirst on me. But the buckle across my foot 
Is a kind of withholding and the heel of my heel is, like 
All bipedal tautologies, proof of a stupid lust. So, in picking up 
My monk straps, in wearing them across arrondissements, 
I wish to refuse relation, consequence, socks. Can shoes 
Mean anything but leaving? I know all about it, walking 
The night to despair myself, so no one else has to. 
My feet love to ruin me, but I am always keen to their illness. 
Honestly, if a woman isn’t trying to annihilate herself,
She is trying to save everyone else. Here, I am never slight or sabotaging. 
In Paris, my shoes click of the past as they skirr into the break of day. 

4.	

In Paris, my past clicks like a spur through the tulle of days, 
But when I ask my husband about his own relationship to walking, 
He sets a new table, gives me words I’ve never tasted before. 
I jaunt to the centerpiece: une drôle de démarche. A funny clip.
He explains that this saying, like all good language, is coated 
In subtext, is sous-entendu to mean that someone has a strange way 
Of seeing things, and suddenly, the long trousered leg of John Cleese
High kicks in my mind’s eye. I am a spell of laughter until I am at the gallows, 
Thinking myself needing of a hanging, because it occurs to me how many 
Of the places where my feet have had footfall have been paid for by others. 
The past didn’t have to be like this, but can steps move along a plot device 
That was shit from the outset? The truth is, I think so. I believe steps 
Redeem, that the more you walk, the more you walk off. Walking like 
Seeing. And like this, I don’t stop moving. Ai-je mis les pieds dans le plat ?

5.	

Ai-je mis les pieds dans le plat ? My mother-in law won’t stop moving, 
But it’s with her that I pause over the best French idioms. 
When we come to see her, I do not bring my city shoes. 
It’s important to slow down, to read the poems unwritten, 
Her poems, to let your feet forget streets. When I go with her to 
The new chicken coop, she explains to me, as she has before, 
That when you cut a hen open you find the unlaid eggs, orange 
As cherry tomatoes, waiting inside like a path. I’ve always liked that
Anecdote is anecdote in French, that a word like a shoe can dress to 
The occasion. My mother-in-law has cut open many hens to my none, 
And yet her story is as necessary to her as it is to me. The retelling like 
A familiar footstep. In Paris, I think of how a woman, in going 
From place to place, is chased by the thought of the unborn. 
In Paris, a woman, telling of the unborn, is chased by the retelling. 

6.	

In Paris, women are chased by the untold lives of their mothers. 
In cities everywhere, women are trying to outstep, outspeak their 
Pedestrian fortunes. My mother has trouble walking, and I miss her 
Footsteps, her black penny loafers. I miss waiting for her by a door,
Her old classroom, and knowing that the way her hips rocked 
And her heels hit was her, that she was arriving at her lair. 
My mother, because of all of the mood of her, has always had a lair. 
She wouldn’t like a poem about her walking, but I hope she hears
Me bearing a life, walking for her, the rock of my hips and the hit of
My heels announcing myself, even across the thick brown carpet 
Of our stairs, my arrival to my daughter. My portable lair. My wilderness. 
If anything, I hope my daughter makes herself a fierce lair. 
All this walking is walking to find refuge. Lair is tanière in French.
Quoi qu’il arrive j'espère que ma fille se fera une tanière féroce.

7.	

Quoi qu’il arrive j'espère que ma fille se fera un chemin féroce.
I have given her the streets of Paris. At least, this is 
How I think of it. Wild as it may be. Boastful, as it is. 
I could not have walked a child out of me in the city 
Where I was walked out. Wild as it may be. Shameful as it is. 
When I walk with my daughter to the market at Place des Fêtes,
Our strides striding, our hands locking, we are teaching ourselves 
To entrust ourselves to our feet. It is intimate to be afoot with someone. 
Afoot, afoot. Say it. And I do, with all the business of my body. 
At the podiatrist’s office, I stand on a glass box while the weight of my life 
Spreads across the countries of my feet. For the inserts, I pick the yellow fabric. 
I want to wrap my feet in marigold. And I do. Like a woman accepting
Her cure. Like a woman telling her story. I lay them across my soles, 
And I take my monk straps to the Petit Palais.