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Michelle Morgan
Our Lady of Shoes Olga Berluti, Our Lady of Shoes, who wept silver tears at the nailed feet of Christ, the wooden statue looming five meters above her in the long convent hall where she had lived, from age three, lionizing an aesthete’s life in white linen and white wool, murmuring the stations of the cross in a holy rosary. In raw leather she molds the feet of every man against the last, buffs the casts with tinctures of the quarter moon and Italian silk dipped in chilled champagne, believing it lends luminescence and protects the warrior soul of the individual among the herd. Under the cry of calf and ox she rips, sews the seam, fingers bleeding, a litany of needles flying like dying stars in pinpoint legion against the black surface of heel and sole, a melismatic chant. “We are moving through toward the perfection of gesture,” she says, and as though to bring humanity one step closer, she sweeps her limbs to her sides, arcing refined lines of arms against the negative space of the marble walls behind her, luring in the masses like the Virgin Mary. All ye little sheep, come to me.
When I found you again I made fast work of tearing all the blinds from the windows, washing ten years of smoke from the casements, throwing out your pots & pans. I wanted to teach you about light, about the way it hovers in the dusty filaments of morning & not just in the garden where you kept it shut, orderly & useful. In the small green room you’d lined with bookcases, papers you’d never need competed for space. I wanted to break up the floorboards & pry out little treasures buried & lost by some older family less lonely than ours: mute plastic dolls without arms, rose-tinted marbles, broken watches whose gears rattled against their scratched faces.
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