Florence Weinberger

Sometimes it's the grip of the tide
that sucks you down, or it might be
the skid of the earth unsettling you.
The wind strips the kite from your hand.
Sometimes you're holding the wheel
just right when you're hit from behind.

Some things you will learn: to weigh
and measure, cook a roast or bake a cake,
not stray or linger outside of the lines.
Fingers can be taught, you can
train your eyes, subdue your body, your
brain, keep to the ways of predictable grace.

You've done this for years, get in the car,
your eyes and feet now your servants.
You can stop at the light you've stopped at
a thousand times, scan the dark highway
on a clear night, move with familiar skill
into the right lane, slip smoothly into the left.

Days later, awake at four in the morning,
it will chill you again. You'll recall the hit,
then the spinning, you don't know
if it's you or the ground, the spinning,
the endless spinning, and your hands
as useless as everything you know.
...

if only Neruda had glorified pumps instead of cucumbers.
If Keats had immortalized one pair of wedgies.
I would not need to dredge memory for metaphor.
My baby shoes, never bronzed, are history.

I turned thirteen.
My mother bought me the shoes I loved best.
Some dark green nappy fabric, cinnamon leather trim.
She gave me grassland and ground.

I grew tall and taller, bobbled on stiletto heels.
Some saw my eyes, some looked below my knees.
A man fell in love with my notorious instep.
A man stroked my boots while we watched Tosca.

I danced in red shoes, left them on a doorstep in Calcutta.
Aroused a foot fetishist passing by.
My husband, a voyager, wanted to be American.
Ate fried Spam. Left me his collection of blue suede shoes.

(Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher)
...

Baby blue Buddha
what would Neruda
say about you?

You sit in a doorway
miles from Norway
or Katmandu.

There are legions of regions
whose signs are egregious:
deceiving with similar hues.

If you are a logo
for some deadbeat's ego,
that would hardly amuse.

If you're just hired labor
to harbor my neighbor,
what of the turmoil in Bruges?

But if you're distracting
when I should be redacting
the occasional gifts from my muse

I wish you would give me more clues.
...

And, she says, you can always change your mind later.

Stiletto pen above a gut-colored form,
my doctor glows in standard whites.

Yes or no. What does she know?
She's just held a cold disc to my throat
where the carotid tends to clog.

What if the river of blood, the flood of no return
is taking a pause, has become a slow leak
like the push it takes to pee at my age
and then resumes its creaky way
but it goes, it goes.

How can she be certain I'm too far gone
to harrow my muse or atone?

But under the rules her demeanor
is controlled
and her time is brief.
...