Bronzed Pair of Booties
by Edward Mycue
— bronzed pair of booties holding down a sagging telephone line,
— picture from a gone time but one that is still just out my window
here on fulton and octavia streets next to olive trees with plastic bags caught in
them
—“witches cowls”—filled with passing breezes
amid caws of crows & occasions when sea birds escape east from ocean storms &
west
to California from the Sierras when calmer,
settling in our parking lots deciding maybe east or west again, birds moving,
passing,
pausing; only flitting hummingbirds silent so far
— & my mind’s bronzed booties imaged there from pairs of tennis shoes often caught
on lines where drug runners marked territories;
my San Francisco mind-marked with long densely-textured decades written, cared-for,
polished, discarded, & somehow are written again
because the mind wasn’t finished with them & i was unable to find a step-down
programme
to get free from voices, visions. where when i’m
dead will those booties go? will there be telephone lines & poles?
will it all sink as sediment under risen shores scraped, lathered by
empowered tides with only birds on their ways in their days that alone continue
while
below fish swim above our yesterday silt
in fog, rain, wind & sun without anyone until “time” arrives as
earth itself fractures into “space” that collides beyond my deeming.