7000 PAIRS OF CHILDREN'S SHOES ON THE CAPITOL LAWN

 

Where have you run to so quickly, dear children,

so fast and so frantic that you have flown,

wingless, from your shoes -- the mud-streaked sneakers

and Mary Janes, the summer flip-flops and rainbow

jellies, Western boots and boxy black Oxfords,

reserved for church and family weddings.

You have left no tracks, dear children, your voices

so high that they drip from the tips of branches,

or are disguised among the shrieks of passing birds.

But it's your songs which we miss the most now,

how you narrated the most mundane of days,

called out the clouds by name, laughed

so hard that we worried over your very breathing.

We have placed them here upon the lawn,

rows and rows of them, awaiting your return.

We have left a path between each for you to walk.

You do not answer, even with your silence.

Children, it's getting darker with each passing minute.

How will you find your way after sunset

and nothing on your feet? What could we have

done to keep you away so long?

LARRY

 

Larry was the name of the man that my mother

married next, somewhere between ECT treatments

and her daily regimen of pills -- tall, gaunt and ruddy-faced,

simian ears that jutted forward like antennas,

or seashells, glowing translucent and red when

pierced by sunlight, tiny veins like a hundred cracks.

He mistook the marriage, I expect, for one

of love, but my mother needed him for

the much more practical task of disciplining my unruly

brother and me, which he did, following her

instructions like any low-level officer.

He was the first to fold me over a kitchen chair

and strike me, hard, then harder, and then hard enough

to dislodge me from the body, until there I was,

amazingly, watching somehow from above,

as though my own protector, keeper of a hidden

passageway deep within myself, previously unknown.

I didn't think that he was a bad man,

merely someone following orders, obedient

to a fault, perplexed, I imagined, as I was, watching,

as though this were but a poorly acted play.

Though I was, secretly, proud to have not cried,

proud to have left the body, without anyone so much

as noticing; and when I came back, having passed

their test, apologizing for my meager sins,

I didn't come back all the way. Not for them,

and not for a long time to come.