A Single Shoe

“Return” by Anya Krugovoy Silver

When he returned home after many years,
an enormous oak had split his house in two,
its trunk growing right through the center hall,
Though there was nobody living in the tilting
rooms, he recognized some simple objects:
a milk jug once filled with daisies, a single shoe.
Where a mirror had dangled, a darkened oval
remained on the wall. No bark, no call, no singing.
But though he didn’t understand what he saw,
he knew the tree, broad and green, was a blessing.

(from Second Bloom, Cascade Books, 2017, p. 6)

* * * * * * *

A Single Shoe

In Anya Silver’s poem “Return” a man comes to his home after many years away to find it in ruins, split by an “enormous oak,” moldering and abandoned.

Imagining the scene feels like memory, though I have never had to face that particular kind of loss. I think of Charlotte Brontë’s Rochester in Jane Eyre, blind and dejected, at the foot of the great oak split by lightning. I think of the faces of actors who have shown us with skill that can only come from empathy what shock and sorrow look like—Sam Shepherd, Denzel Washington, Judy Dench as a stricken queen, Maggie Smith, now newly gone, playing an old woman grudgingly coming to terms with her own prejudices in one of her final films.

Sudden awareness of loss takes you whole—your nerves buzz, your heart fills the whole chest cavity, familiar objects look odd and alien, the ends of your fingers go numb. A sensation you can’t name fills your veins like molten lead. Things don’t connect. You notice them, as though you’d never seen them before—familiar objects that are now, what? Rubble? Flotsam? Relics? Finding blessing in the midst of it all, for most of us, takes time. Also a radical reframing that can only happen by grace.

In graduate school I took a course on literature of the Holocaust. The professor had spent her childhood in the Viennese ghetto, then in Theresienstadt, then in Auschwitz. She and her mother escaped and hid in freezing woods for two months before they ventured into a village and learned the camps had been liberated. She told little of her own story in that class, but the tattooed number she didn’t bother to hide gave her an authority to be reckoned with in new ways by each of us as we read one memoir, story, poem after another, trying to imagine cruelty and suffering that seemed just beyond the reach of imagination. (Now, of course, we see such images routinely from the streets of Gaza and Khartoum and Ukrainian villages, but even that suffering, as literal as the camera eye can render it, remains at this distance strangely, achingly, just beyond imagining.)

One day our professor showed us Alain Resnais’ documentary film, Night and Fog—a silent tour of the empty camps just after the inmates had been buried or taken away to be fed or treated or to die in soft beds in quiet hospitals. Image after slow image evoked a horror I couldn’t quite find words for: the edge of hell, I thought. Atrocity. Abomination. Obscenity.

It wasn’t the appalling piles of skeletal bodies being shoveled into pits that haunted me in the days after I first saw the film; those images plumbed an enormity so grotesque something in me shut down, and shuts down still: I go numb. But as the camera moves into big storage barns a different kind of image appears, unbearably evocative: piles of hair, glistening in sunlight from high windows; piles of suitcases; piles of glasses. Great piles of shoes.

In “Return” the bewildered man notices a single stray shoe. Like the shoes I remember from that awful stockpile in Auschwitz, it bears the shape and memory of a foot. It seems a mute, incomplete testimony to a terribly foreshortened journey.

Stray shoes are oddly personal, poignant, slightly disturbing when you come upon them abandoned in parking lots or on a beach where sand castles have long since given way to the rising tide.

I think of an anonymous century-old bit of “flash fiction,” a six-word story that goes straight to the reader’s heart: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

I think of the worn black house-shoes in which my grandmother cut holes to relieve the pressure on bunions.

I think of the little white shoe with a strap and bow I saw on the news this morning, sitting in its precarious angle of repose on a pile of rubble in Lebanon.

I remember helping a particular hospice patient put on her shoes many times: she wanted them on; she didn’t feel respectable without them, but they hurt her. I’d pick up the offending shoe with mixed feelings. “It will hurt you to put it on,” I’d remind her, but she wanted it on. Then, as I tried gently to slip it on, she cried out that I was hurting her. So I stopped. A few minutes later the negotiation began again. That single shoe became the focal point of her confusion, frustration, pain, sense of inexplicable loss. For me, it represented the complexity of caring for those whose losses put them just beyond the reach of comfort.

When comfort fails, what remains is to bear witness. Be present. Touch. Say the ritual words with no expectation that they will diminish the sorrow. Then look again. Notice the tree, still growing and greening where death had seemed to have dominion. Stand in the shade of the tree and receive what it offers. Go home and write a poem.