Shoes

Shoes

My father died and joined my mother

in the place that is just beyond

whatever wall I am looking at the moment.

Years spent attached to a machine

while the vampire of modern medicine

sucked him dry of everything

he had spent his life struggling for.

My sister popped the balloon of their now-empty home

and let the memories fly out with a whoosh,

like dry leaves from the apple orchard

and butterflies from the bookcase,

like an electric train on a track

that didn’t circle back,

but just ran on out of sight.

The lawn mower woke up

chugged off looking for grass

that was two inches too long.

My mother’s attic of compressed memory,

frozen on dry cardboard, blew out

in piles of images of a family that would no longer

travel down blue highways

to Cherokee motels with rubber tomahawks.

Dolls whose eyes were now blind

stumbled off on stiff legs, arm in arm with

little boys in cowboy suits and paratrooper boots.

In the end, all that was left of him for me

was three pairs of strong shoes –

shoes for holding your own,

shoes for bracing yourself against the onslaught of life.

shoes for standing your ground.

They were not my shoes.

My shoes were designed for going,

for speed, for getting from a place

I no longer wanted to be to the greener grass of Eden,

to the greener glass of the Emerald City,

so that I could confront Oz the Terrible and Mighty

and get my wish granted,

but I polished those shoes

like I did when I was a boy trying to please him,

and then I put them on to see how they felt,

and now I can’t get them off again.