Personality in Parenthesis
I
His boots are empty, maws of black
gabardined and galvanised
waiting for the woollen flesh
to tread them into bovine haunts
of peat and pasture, byre and beer.
Stiff-neckt and stubborn-toed
stout-heeled with chunks of wear
where resolution met resistance
and neither came to compromise.
Yet in the surface can be seen a
cragginess which with a whispered
word or stroke melts into rare gentility.
II
The boots stand just inside the door
a paradigm of modern womanhood, her
world within my own. Calf-length,
lopped over hare-like, stilettos incisor-sharp,
doe-lined and tap’ring to the point though
velvet-smooth; fashioned from calf-belly, a
touch of culture and coffee;
a pied urbanised, aroma of Arabia,
soled and heeled by brush of Bremworth,
parquet’s fing’ring. So much of her is there
I never noticed when she went; I smoothed
and tongued the boots.
