Foothold

BY DANA DELIBOVI

That first warm week in April,
I stood barefoot in the garden,
pink-polished toenails caked with mud.

The faults in the polish,
little pink chips cracked-off by a
telltale entropy,
reminded me that bits of my feet,
their skin, nails and bones
were sloughing inexorably
and flaking down into the silt.

Foot quanta
flowed through the ground,
ready to feed
grasses and crabapple trees—
because the energy of life is not our own.
We borrow it,
then return it scrap by scrap.

To be barefoot outdoors
is to tempt fate.