Four Inch Red High-heel Shoes

"I am far from being a pessimist ... On the contrary,
in spite of my scars, I am tickled to death at life!" —Eugene O'Neill

I love deep, dark red lipstick and long legged women
with 4 inch red high heel shoes fashionable
"once upon a time."  Obvious compels memory to idols
drawn into heart beating as longing repeats in home movies
copied from Super Eight Kodacolor to DVDs --the projector,
idle, discarded with our masked memory and stored
in that maze with scores of unmarked boxes hidden
in the basement for history to open and not erase.

Ironic, that day when we stood up next to the crib;
we nurse from a bottle or breast, and the childhood
of our parents stamps us again repeating scenes,
trauma and disguise of our parents burns our fingers.
We do not remember the abuse. We love the red shoes.

In this I lean on what is beautiful by capricious standards
when vulnerable my life depended on silent gestures
and soft words, irrational screams transcend personal
comforts. It goes round and may be obvious
in the usual ways of looking at striking women --
her foot, calf, leg, and bearing what we expect when
the tame ocean breaks down the shore. We know
commercial smiles and wait on the sand dune
while the sea birds, background to the photograph,
are invisible, for high heel red shoes are rare on
the beach except when the tide pools, sand
and last, brief waves stain footsteps that assure
the fact of her slow walk out of the water --
She is not a mermaid but a woman with
power to heal the eyes if not former wounds.

There are more questions to romance now.

Let me ask? Were the lies wrapped in silk and let
down, as she posed with her hair waved over the edges
of ceremonial balconies where flags with swastika, stars
and stripes ripped gorgeous wind swirled in empty streets
after the rallies in Munich and contemporary DC
simplified into loyal oaths, curses and family politics.
What else is power? The family dies before children sing,
or Jacob has his Bar Mitzvah while Esther a woman
with one daughter with bleached golden hair
and red lipstick high heel shoes spreads from Auschwitz
across the lonely daylight theater she survived
to walk without spine and then a rudimentary brain.

One stroke of a hammer and she was done. Red shoes
are no longer worth the costs for survival. She was not proud
she said, but relieved when god asked, well, life is worth
living as Bishop Sheen said a thousand times on TV now
repeated on the Catholic cable channel complete
with the review of holy orders and the tragedy of
vague recollections tarnished by witness in the afterlife.

Observe her spinal cord and its medulla oblongata.
If "The lowermost portion of the vertebrate brain" is cut,
ruptured, crushed, then breathe stops, blood pressure
simple falls to zero mercury recorded by arm bands
resolved into truth and false witness. "The thick, whitish
cord of nerve tissue branches off" into various cities
and every plate of Terra slides along that weak fissure
when the family tectonics breaks down, and no longer
satisfies the hunger for political slogans, masks
and family bibles set out on motel tables, knocked
on the floor by an elbow driving man who splits his
woman's along the roads to Rome via Berlin highways.

History can mingle in memory as false, or what we call
spurious maps of what we are, past and present, and how
the woman in red high heels, graceful, she walks on the sand
an impossible act, but given the human mind, reasonable
when that sexual rise in time leaps the earth and soars
somewhere where even rainbows, dear Judy, fail.

I love deep, dark red lipstick and long legged women
with 4 inch red high heel shoes and an actual smile
drawn from the lives of every ancestor we cannot choose.

 

4-04-06