He admired my shoes, cut leather, cobbled by hand, each nail in the sole rapped in with rhythm of prayer.
I tell him all souls have nails you can’t see tapped into them by silent hammers.
Clumsy, but he smiles, walks over to the car to run his hands along the chrome, his own shoes crunching the gravel, his admiration now a hymn to some previous life.
The madness of his beard says he sings to his own god, laughs like a Russian hermit, familiar in his own church a reedy laugh, too well read, to endure the winters here without shoes.