The Shoe
[Kathryn Starbuck]
Each time I relived it, after the worst
was over, I’d say to myself, as if my fate
would solace me,
”at least I’ll never have to do this again.”
It is true that I’ll never have to kiss his
dying hands, now dead. I’ll never have
to find where he left his coffee mug, now mine.
I’ll never have to wash his hair or repair
his typewriter or stock the medicine stand.
I’ll never even have to find places
that can use his clothes because
some friend-I don’t remember who-
did that for me when I could not. I
distributed his portrait, I picked up his poems.
I thanked friends and children for helping me
hold on. I made braids out of dead funeral
flowers to border the rooms where
once he breathed and took on the heavy
chores, gladly, of loving me. I sprinkled
one teaspoon of his ashes on our bereft bed
and slept with them. They scourged my body.
But when that single shoe, the mate I thought
had got sent off with its partner, showed up
today, alone, crouching behind the couch, alive
with Effie’s opulent Turkish angora fur, I knew
solace was something I could neither seek nor
find. Oh beloved! I know I am an old woman.
But I cannot live in your shoe.
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Things are busy over here today, so I just thought I'd leave you all with a poem that I read in Best American Poetry 2009, and that has resonated with me since. Enjoy!
L. Stacks
