At these alight latitudes All afternoon wind ferries letters – Maple-five-fingered, beech-arrow-headed, ginko-fanned From the heights (So blue, so blue if you can bear to look)

To the crosshatched earth, On which you walk, Suddenly alert and alive As if your heart stuck in its bell jar Just received its southern migratory telegram,

Your arms spread at your sides (How surprisingly warm are the wine dark nebulae of mums!) feeling for long moments more like a biplane than a biped.

Is it just me in whom sightings of women hobbling around in knee high riding boots evoke these vivid images of blonde SS aufseherins, barking orders in guttural German[1] as evil looking whips swish overhead? Speaking of these boots (there goes another pair), this doesn't mean that I find myself wishing that my eyes be equipped with shoe reshaping lasers which would enable to me to demolish & refashion horrid shoes that cross my vision to suit my elevated aesthetic tastes - this wish grows particularly insistent when I behold shoes such as those with dagger-like pointy fronts and stiletto heels[2], which offend all senses of theology and geometry - no, with these boots my responses are decidedly more delicately complex and repressed, very much like those I may have towards kinky sexual activities such as application of exotic feathers to strategic locations[3]. O! So doth a man acquire more neuroses to discuss with a potential therapist.

[1] Yet Rilke's German, even if largely incomprehensible to me, has so much sonic force