Bare Into the World

The things I think I know  

are old and tired, mostly.  

Sneakers battered by long days,  

soles splitting, collapsing sides.

The once-white long since  

draggled through the filth  

of urban concrete and  

wetly muddened fields.  

Still, I grapple them on.  

I make them my feet.  

They shape the ways I wobble  

in the world. Lurch. Leave my  

staggered indentations, prints  

declaring, “I have touched this place.”  

Yet, like the shapes they press  

into my paths, they are askew.

How long has it been since I  

squished my arches into the  

spring of moss, tickle of fronds,  

earth ionized by rain?  

Since I went bare into the world?  

Sending my inner heart to  

my soles and closing  

eyes, connecting,  

as with roots,  

to a single  

moment of evanescence  

and arising, decomposition  

and the revelations of tiny birds?

—Geneve Gil