Footwear
by Bruce Robinson
… and the poor for a pair of shoes.
— Amos 2:6
that first perceptible
aperture on a sock,
the quiet depredation
of the heel, the way
a toe begins to break
instigation of a rift,
or swift elaboration
of plunder in a sole:
and were you in my shoes
oh, you’d feel it too.
Work by Bruce Robinson has appeared in Poetry Australia, Fiction, Pleiades, Mobius, Fourth River/Tributaries, Cleaver, and Pangyrus, and is forthcoming in Blueline and the Beautiful Cadaver “Dreamers” anthology. A lifelong fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a slightly less than lifelong devotee of whippets, Charles Trenet, and Marcel Pagnol, he’s now more likely to be found watching Gojira with his granddaughter. Or watching his granddaughter with Gojira.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Footwear”? “Footwear,” as near as I can tell, sprang fully grown from…somewhere…at the beginning of the year. The only real edit I can detect – and because so much of my drafting is done, and consequently erased, on computer, there’s a real limit to what I can detect – is the addition (substitution) at some point of the word “plunder.” And I have no idea why I have the epigram; it’s not as though I’m reading Amos on a regular basis, although in preparing these notes I discovered that I also have a draft of a rondelet which plays with an interesting concept in Amos. Dunno. But without question, there must be in this foggy genesis story some recognition of my long history of wearing socks until they’re practically shredded, of wearing shoes well beyond Adlai Stevenson’s comfort level. And yet I want to say, in my defense – is it defense or is it self-incrimination – that I take some pride in my stash of finely shaded (and mostly intact) socks and natty, if off-the-shelf, shoes. Yes, there’s something of the Midas complex here, and I’m at some pains to trot out some decent footwear every now and then. I’m happy I did not retain “Footwear” in some lower left-hand drawer.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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