To His Soul, and: The Fencing Shoe, and: The Turin Horse, and: Elemental

    Soul,You too are just another locust,Only lonely in the swarm,    Soul,You pagan clinging to this body,Your rabbit’s foot, your charmAgainst the death that pricksYour ears up in alarm,    Soul,You firecracker hidden in a midden,You prize that is in every box,    Soul,You web designer, working from homeIn nothing but your socksAnd in that home so scared you spendYour whole life checking locks,    Soul,You self-proclaimed sequoia felledWith just a couple thwocks,    Soul,You too are just one more deserter,Haggard, eager to disarm,Hoping these AmericansDon’t mean to do you harm

The Fencing Shoe

Really, with him so young, the kids so young—his mother (who had never liked his choice)was waiting out the fall before she asked him.She had some candidates in mind. So didthe ladies at her book club. They would wait.But he’d already thought it through that morningsix weeks past the wake when he awokealive and hard the first time in foreverand lay there motionless for half an hourremembering Sir Richard Francis Burton’sfavorite fencing shoe, the one he carriedacross five continents and Iceland, beggingthe cobblers everywhere he traveled(and Burton traveled everywhere) to makea mate for, since he’d lost the first one backin Guzerat, when he was twenty-two.He really loved those fencing shoes, the waythe lost one used to hug his leading foot.The cobbler in Trieste, who could have usedthe money, crossed himself and shook his head.As far off as Harar and Buenos Aires,in villages a shoelace wide, in Iceland,even, the superstition held: No cobblerwould dare restore the pair. In fact, the wordthey used, when pointing at the shoe he showed them,astonished him, the same in Portuguese,Amharic, Hindi, Scots, the whisper fallinglike fresh snow in Icelandic: widower.

The Turin Horse

When it happened(we knew for months that it would happen)I felt, and this is going to seem, I know,a super-highbrow reference, but I feltlike Nietzsche syphilitic in Turin.Like I’d just finished up badmouthingWagner and Christ and slaves and nice peopleand now, while wandering all disheveleddaydreaming dithyrambs and treponemes,I saw the whipping of the Turin horse.Somehow the horse was everyone I saw,and while I didn’t throw my arms around themI stumbled onward, everywhere about to.I wanted to explain that, yes, my dadjust died, and with him all my highphilosophy. I wasn’t up on SilsMaria anymore. I knew that theyhad lost somebody toothey wouldn’t talk about, they never talkedabout. You do not have to puta brave face on around me, friends. I’m notan intellectual anymore. I know the heart,that brown horse, won’t move onno matter how time whips it. I knowyour dead and mine are stubborn horsesand we will throw our arms around themsobbing with love not at all universal,what though we tumble through the imago,our arms enclosing onlythe dust motes in a sunlit window floatingin the house where I grew up the day I have to sell it.My friends, I was the sole albino pigeonstrutting cooring on the cobblestoneswhile all of you had bruise-gray featherspretending bruised was how you were born.I’m broken now, like Nietzsche in Turin,where death is whipping, whipping, whippingmy father stubborn on the cobblestones,

a leather strap between his teeth, his fetlocksbloody and his round eye darting.I will not leave I will not leave my boy.You had this sadness in you all along,but I believed you frivolous, unphilosophical.Forgive me, all you secret mourners,citizens of Turin, believers in the shroud.I’m broken, and I need you all to teach mehow not to twitch and rave beneath a shawlin an asylum for...