Beaded Baby Moccasins

If   love is like a doll’s shoe —

the color of nascent snow

that laces over the ankle

or the polychromatic beaded baby moccasins

we saw lying in the museum drawer

that belonged to an infant from a sea tribe of seal hunters.

Or the rutilant pink blossoms

of the locust tree that bloomed in the dark

while I slept dreaming of my arrival

on a red-eye wearing a long to the floor skirt —

not of a postulant, but of a flower vendor

or a woman covering disfigurement.

Freud believed that religious faith

is a wish-fulfilling illusion.

I can’t locate faith in a carved or uncarved pew.

I’m more focused on the altar boy’s shoes.

Under his white robe he’s wearing a man’s black loafers

vastly oversized for his small feet with

sufficient spare space for a coyote den in each toe.

I want to buy him a kite.

If   love is a mezzanine floor we will not fall from,

a hand holding back my hair from my face

as I’m sick on the side of the bus.

The mouth so at home in the vicinity of pavement.

Pew also means to enclose, as in men who were

as their sheep were in night folds.

Freud also believed civilized life imposes suffering,

yet he always wore a dinner jacket.

We delaminate layers of old paint

bleach sheets in the shade.

I take out the oily ham from the beans,

the unflattering photos from the folio,

the quotes about repressed homosexuality

being the reason Sigmund’s patient Little Hans

is afraid of   horses.