The Shoe

Without knowing, with that detachment
that knew nothing of the plunging thrashing
existence of the scrabbled muscled leg
deliberately moving of itself, behind the mules
he did not move it, not for his own peace of mind,
nor for life, nor for the harried furious need of his kind.

He knew that shoe should stay--
the vanishing unfinished fierce permanence of
that shoe his father had finally left where it now sat,
turning that hard, implacable gaze down the weary upsloping drive
before leaving for good without looking back.

The shoe was not an empty hull for covering a foot,
nor was it a drowsy symbol of lost innocence or
maidenhead, but a simple reminder of implacable memory
of his father's incorrigible ungrazing
life in the deliberately consigned employ
where he could see if nothing else the
unrelenting hardness of the sole which held the key--
the essence--to that indomitable resistance.

So it sat in the middle of the room.
He hadn't and neither would he ever
move it or finally try it on.
Nor could he ever understand it
because nobody would ever or could ever
reveal to him that indomitable, intractable shoeness
that was unalterably not sitting in that hall,
but now beyond that actual shoe,
an essential raw blind instinctive pummeling
of the liquidation that was the vindication of his father's ravelled,
shattered sentience after nineteen years
behind the mules tugging immobile,
upright against the traces in those nympholeptic furrows
refusing to take one step less with that
interminable nothingness of rational, deadly intent.

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