Foot Fashion for Faerie: Low Price Guaranteed

You’ve heard, I think, of the man with feet of clay
who’s not quite man, in fact, but you forget
perhaps how brittle . . . and to walk!
To walk on jugs!
Cracked against curbstones
or not yet fired folding, melting
back to mud.

Impossible!
The baby needs new shoes!

So cast the dice
and slide those new pink toes
into this slipper.
No!

Perfection drives its bargain hard.
Off goes the coach with Cinderella
who forged her dainty pieds in the kitchen fire
alone and unperturbed
by the dainty Majorcan maidens on the table by the door
two women, parasols and frothy flounces,
pinched at their middles by thick, slip-gray fingers

See what potential in smoke and ash, compost & detritus.
The prince had to invite us: She just came.

Some years pass and she climbs in another tale
upward through stories of stone.
She fashions a figure of filigree and film
but the puling thing she births is nothing like
not blue to pink to green, not gold of head
not prancing through the lawns
not singing with the birds

but --this is true--
flat-foot, ungainly, pocked—a lot like me
like you.

Beyond the glinting parapets
as the awkward child descends
cloud spins to ether & the warrented dream amends:

The golem speaks and plays the flute
Wood boys grow skin and nails
A dainty porcelain maiden meets Adonis by the door.

She turns the latch and grabs the broom and sweeps the kitchen floor.