KIM WELLIVER
He No Longer Eats Vienna Sausages

It is simply that his shoes are too tight.
 
After pedaling through Innere Stadt,
he makes his daily rounds,
dazzled where St. Stephan's spines and spires
sketch, friable royal icing, against the sky,
where the sheer gold wash of light
drenches Ringstrasse
and the Danube's delft dream-
pared skin of some sublime cerulean fruit,
uncoils along the city,
he feels gauche, a turnip
pig corn rough.
 
And his feet hurt.
 
Idealized as an illustration from 1950,
So clean he'd bleed
if you cut any closer
he proffers salvation, a loose-knuckled
gawk, a farmboy with the
Book of Mormon in leatherette
and a slim volume
of Austria's everyday phrases
"This is my pencil.
The bathroom is on
the right.
Where is the doctor?"
"Wo ist der Arzt?"
The latter will come in useful
 
Because his digits,
unfamiliar with the doctrine
of missionary work
unaware as most underlings are,
of their importance
in mass conversion, rebel.
Lapped beneath the tongue
corset-laced
his big toe grows
purple as a cabbage, fester
sets in beneath a nail
thick as an apple slice.
 
His shoes are simply too tight
 
So off he trundles,
in his crisp shirt, salvation
tucked in his pocket
like a soiled hankie,
to the Viennese doctor,
herr, herr.
As that medical man
clicks his heels like some deluded Dorothy,
unveiling bone saw
and something akin, achtung!
to surgical tin-snips,
this little lamb is led.
 
He will learn to scream in Austrian.
 
Stumbling through indecipherable
paper stubs, thumbing useless phrases
of "The bakery is down the street" and
"This room is fine."
unable to find a phrase for horror,
no words for shrieks of no.
"Nein! Nein!"
Foreign reassurance spills
into his cochlear canal;
a parody of Mozart.
 
It is only after,
dazed and hobbled
that he understands the sacrifice religion demands.
 
He searches for the spiritual significance of tight shoes.
 
He shuffles through Vienna,
Austria's tender jewel, bright shining city
blind to its cathedrals, and the gleaming Danube.
Instead he finds communal ruck,
his fellow man
lopsided, lurching glass-eyed,
up Strauss streets, bits and pieces
whittled away, pared into
stump-legged, peg-footed,
fingerless manikins.
 
He no longer eats Vienna sausages.