Which is worse, the body
or the mind? Pressing, always straining
to be somewhere else:
the headlong weight of them.
But the feet
are kind, they hope
we’re trying. “No,” they say,
just, “no”— and only after hours
of bad posture and
stomping around.
It’s to themselves that they repeat
the lesson once we’ve gone to sleep —
the instep’s petalled curve,
the artless bones: The earth
is all you stand on. Every step.
