Here, I am putting on my boots
and it takes me a good suck of a breath of time fiddling with them—as though
sewing up a wound, as though locking
away a wondering spirit suited up for war—
the door slams heavy after me on the way out.
To be fair, these are the long and slender boots,
the hide and leather boots, the ones laced heavy
with shoestrings like interconnecting highways
and inner tunnels and tollbooths
bankrupting fingers fetching after aglets,
speeding after footsteps. These are the boots I tie
as though weaving an empire from the straw huts and gatherers
to the callus-handed sailors hoisting rope after taut rope,
pulling up the anchors,
hauling in the fishes,
drawing loose the sails.
These are the boots I wear to return me to my roots,
who know their way back home across the Whitestone Bridge into Pelham
who dive their soles into puddles and graze slumped along the cobblestone
and tack, tack, tack on forward and along the street dweller's drum,
back home defeated and forlorn to the parents after yonder years gone.
—A funny thought strikes!
About the way boots always come in pairs and how I grieve for the girl
paired against the silhouette of her own shadow and the tack tack tack of heel and cement
as though a knock to the earth, and her pleads for some new door.
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139,585 Literary Works • 672,611 Reviews
Heya, Audy! Casanova here to do a review!
The firs thing I didn't really like was the repetition of,"These boots I..." it felt a little played out and redundant, at least to me. One of these would have been enough, with the poem continuing where the last line stopped at. Anyway, onward.
The next thing I noticed were these lines-
These lines were a bit off, I guess you could say. I assume you're talking about your roots to begin with, but then you say,"know their way back home," and realize your roots are your home, so I assume you're talking about the boots. But it wouldn't make sense to be talking about the boots.
I'm sorry for the crap review, but overall I do feel like this is a really good poem with minor nitpicks to be had, and that's all on perspective and style preferences. So props on the good work, I don't think I'll attempt this again.
That's all I have to say on this one.
Keep on doing what you're doing, and keep on keeping on.
Sincerely, Cas
Audy!
Good grief, you have some lines in here! But, those aside, I'm not sure I like stylistically what you're doing. I'm still sussing out if it's just me, or if it's more that I'm not sure it works in general.
That said: there are a few things I absolutely love. "These are the boots I tie/..." to the next line, and then the line with "return me to my roots." Your last three lines, too, I like. I'm not sure I like the transition directly above, but I'm also not sure what else would work.
Ok, so I've thought a bit more, and I think I know what's nagging at me more than anything, and that's the fact that this is wordy (don't laugh, I know this review is getting wordy!)! You also know I tend to pare down a bit too much, so take that with a giant grain of salt. I like the parallelism you have going, but it's simply too much. The stanza that sticks out the most is the third, both visually and in terms of not-strictly-needed extensions of the sailing metaphor. It's also the stanza that's probably the most loosely tied to the others: it's also the only one where you don't overtly use the word "boots."
Everything else is more a matter of me wanting to trim things that I should probably leave alone: I would leave off in the second to last stanza after "forlorn," for example. The second half of the line sounds off rhythmically to my ear, and I'm not positive you need the extra words anyway.
Other than my style issues (and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's mostly me, here), I like what you're doing, and where you're going. I especially like the lines drawn between your final stanza and the first. I think you could focus a bit more in the second and (especially) third stanzas on sound, since you do hone in on that in the others to I think good effect.
Thanks for the read! <3
I found the boots to be a nice comparison with struggling with life. If that was the point you tried to get across, then good job. As for the girl, I think it could either be a past experience of a different person or a memory of the narrator. It was a bit unclear to me, but then again, that just might be me. I'm not always the best person when it comes to trying to interpret poetry.