“Shoe” by Sarah Arvio

Shoe

I was going to meet my own death

and it stood me up

Or that is I stood up and said not now

Some days I know I won’t stand for it

Can you stand the thought of being dead

some days I think I’ll take it lying down

Sometimes it’s good to take a stand

though I think I want a standard-issue death

Shoe in  shoe out without a horn

or play me a horn as I go and come

Or maybe not you but someone else

whose job it is to usher me forth

Stand down I don’t know what this means

Stand up and soft-shoe across the room

The issue is   well do you like your life

Oh hand me a tissue I do want to cry

There’s no such thing as a stand-alone shoe

There are always two to cover feet

Think of not knowing how to feel

think of that while dancing on your heel

Death might not be up or even down

it could slip in sideways  it could shuffle

It could stand very still

like a life on the stand of the world

Do hand me a tissue or a handkerchief

I don’t know whether to wave or cry

I don’t know whether to live or die

it could slide sideways after all

Like two shoes dancing in the living room

or two heels hopping in the dying room

“Shoe” from Cry Back My Sea by Sarah Arvio. Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Arvio. Reprinted by permission of the author and Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No portion of the excerpts may be reproduced without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

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Sarah Arvio is the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono Cantos, and Visits from the Seventh. Her most recent work is a translation of poems and a play by Federico Garćia Lorca, Poet in Spain. Honors include the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Bogliasco fellowships, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught at Princeton and Columbia. She lives in New York City.