MARGE PIERCY
HEEL SHOULD NOT BE AN INSULT
The true humility of heels:
pale, battered, wrinkled, swollen.
We may paint our toes, but naked
heels are dumb as cows' behinds.
Patient, stubborn, vulnerable
they follow us looking back
like children in cars making faces
through the rearview window.
In undressing a lover, even
foot fetishists must blink:
the sock, the stocking peeled,
the unappetizing bony fruit.
We are always landing on them
slamming them into pavement,
jumping out of trucks, forcing
them into stirrups and pedals.
Cats walk on their toes like ballerinas
but we, ape cousins, go shuffling
and what we leave in the sand
is the imprint of our heels coming home.
They are the periods under the leaping
exclamation point, gravity's mooring,
our anchor to earth, the callused
blind familiar of soil, rock, root.
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