Boris Gourevitz’s Shoe (Mac McClain, Mexico City, 1953) …and so we proceed on into 2012, broke, looking for stars on mountain nights. When a moon is added, a blessing. (from the letters of Mac McClain, 1923-2012) You lived knowing you were lucky, you and Boris Gourevitz at art school a few years after shrapnel ripped his leg, forcing him to wear a four-inch heel you couldn’t take your eyes off. It lived with him, on him and also had its own life throwing shadows other forms burbled from: sun-flecked leaves growing at the arch, fish swimming over toes, amoebas lurking in the dark or rising as dustmotes, electric particles, the heel itself a stack of bones echoed by dark slashes in the shade. Rosiness runs through it from crimson at toe-joints to garnet under loopy laces dissolving into pastel pinks and oranges against blue. In Mexico you dug clay out of caves, built a wooden wheel, began to learn ceramics. Boris sculpted granite using chisels, refused to use pneumatic carving tools. Boris had been Air Force, you were Infantry. At war’s end you took a bus to Grasse, started walking across France, reached Toulouse, erupted into poems. Decades later, house-bound, you wrote about a bobcat chasing a red squirrel near your front porch, of Joanie’s horse, of coyote barks and howls and the White Leghorn chickens your grandpa raised, 80 years before, on a California ranch you considered paradise. Of how you thought of me at moonrise. Both lonely, we found solace in smoke signals, vapour trails. Every time the moon hangs herself I think of you. Penelope Moffet Penelope Moffet’s poetry has been published in Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Levure Litteraire, Truthdig, Pearl, Steam Ticket, Wavelength, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and other literary journals. She lives in Southern California. Her second chapbook, It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You, is about to be published by Arroyo Seco Press.
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October 2024
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