Wearing High Heels

It was those heels
that I wore
to the Class Eight jam session.
They left red weals on my feet
as I stumbled
across the dusty JB Petit school hall.
But that night
the weedy boys
from the school next door turned into something else - lithe warriors,
medieval, almost epic,
dark, deccan,
bodies supple as bowstrings, gait honed by a wisdom as old as Patanjali
(with just a frisson
of Travolta),
their conversations fluent as streams that burble
by motionless sages
in forest hermitages,
their senses alert
to jungle breath and portents of sky and recondite shifts of womanweather.
I have grown
too tall for heels.
The boys have grown
into bankers
and soft-bellied intellectuals.
But when lights dim
and city drawing-rooms turn vertiginous,
I see them all over again, dark, feral, lean-haunched, shadowy,
shape whittled down
to what really counts -
men.