To the Artist's Page     To our home page

To Barbara DeCesare's next piece

Aria

The Man Who Feels Everything
wants to know where we keep the shoes
in his size.

His feet are bleeding.
I am reluctant to point out the shelves.

The man takes down a pair of
black loafers.
They are full of blood,
he replaces them.

The next pair of shoes,
size eleven basketball sneakers,
full of blood as well. The Man Who Feels Everything returns them.

I pretend to be doing something with my hands and
a small girl's Mary Janes,
buckling and unbuckling the shiny strap.

"Are they all like this?"
The Man Who Feels Everything asks me.

The next pair is 
white slipper dock shoes
which can only look good on a middle aged man
at the helm of his yacht
in navy and golds, shorts that show off
patchy streaks of wiry gray leg hair,
drinking Seagram's at 11:00 AM and is
so fabulously wealthy
no one would say the shoes look bad.
Those shoes are filled with meal worms
and smell of gangrene.

"Perhaps there is somewhere else around here?"
The Man Who Feels Everything asks me.
"I don't know,"
I say. I don't know much about shoes
or where to get them. I work in the store.
Shoes come to me.

The Man Who Feels Everything buys the pair I have been buckling.
"It is impossible to forget,"
he says
and bleeds over the threshold.

To the top of this page