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Boot Fantasia in Three Parts
copyright 2011 William L. Houts
United States of America
All Rights Reserved
I.
There are boots in the desert.
The sun has eaten their laces.
The wind has taken their
high black polish.
In places, their soles are thin.
They stand under sand.
I think there’s more than
a pair of them sharing darkness
between those grains of earth,
darkness like underground sky.
I don’t know how or why the boots
arrived in the desert.
Maybe they fell from above.
It has happened before:
a torrent of stones
like shards of hard heaven,
a blizzard of toads on snoring towns.
The boots could come down,
a plague we never read about.
Some sad magician’s wonder
of boots from a cloud.
Or maybe the people who live
in the desert are prone
to losing their boots.
Riding strange horses
they come to rest at a shady oasis.
They might loosen their laces
And kick off their boots
to bathe and to drink: and drunk
on the clear dark wines
casked in such cellars of the earth,
they ride off again,
leaving their boots behind.
But never mind that.
These boots are all over the desert,
not just oases, and besides,
I’ve heard that people who
forget things do not survive
long in that place.
II.
It may not matter
where the boots came from.
It may only matter
that I want a pair myself,
boots as black as sharks
and twice as dangerous.
In a pair of boots,
a woman or man can
stride the wide world and
never feel the ambivalent
earth between their toes
A pair of black boots
can make fists of your feet;
their shiny heels
strike holes in the ground
with the sound of
clenched fists on a lecture stand.
III.
I have this notion
or dream of the boots
rising up from the desert
and crossing the ocean:
a parade of old shoes,
a triumph of tatters
through our city gates.
They make muttering noises,
as you might hear
a chorus of voices shouting
down a corridor of fifty
or a thousand years.
I don’t know what words
the boots might speak, unless
with cracked black tongues they croak
the verbs which sound the same
in any language.
If the boots came to your door,
would you let them in?
If the boots entered your house,
wouldn’t you put them on?
