The Convention of Mismatched Socks

Beneath the sofa, in the dark deep place,
where light is only a faint gleam,
the congress gathers, a pure parliament’s grace
of threads alone and without seam.
Here hangs the heel, there the slow elastic band,
each one a story of a foot departed,
an uncertain fate, an attentive silence,
of the lost companion never heard again.

No lament crosses this heavy atmosphere,
nor blame breaks the quiet covenant.
With subtle wisdom that time cannot sever
the knot of an abstract attachment,
they share the weight of a forced freedom,
the naked thrill of being alone.
The hope, sometimes, of an enchanted washing machine,
that restores a lost enchantment.

It is not sorrow their delicate veil,
but awareness, ancient and mild,
that every pair dissolves beneath the sky
in a voyage of infinite fiber.
And if one day, by chance, a gaze catches them,
sees them united, in discordant peace,
they will tell the world that it does not bury them
the odd fate that precedes them.