Praising a shoehorn is a joke, and Dave Bonta commits to it. An ode is supposed to lift its subject into grand language. Here the subject is the humblest of household tools, and the poem uses it to take a swipe at one of the loudest myths in the language, that a person can rise by their own efforts alone. The shoehorn quietly admits that everyone needs a bit of help getting into their shoes.
The first stanza is mostly definition, and it keeps correcting itself. "A shoehorn's a sort of / spoon-shaped chute" sounds like someone searching for the right words in conversation, and the line break after "sort of" leaves the hesitation hanging. The image is exact, though. A chute is something you slide down, and the foot really does slide. Then comes the surprise: the shoehorn is "for the foot, / not for the shoe." That reverses the usual way of thinking, because we normally imagine the tool serving the shoe. Bonta puts the comfort and dignity on the side of the foot, the part of us that has to squeeze in.
The next move is funnier. The shoehorn becomes "a social lubricant / between the two," the phrase we use for the drink that loosens a stiff party. The foot and the shoe turn into two awkward guests who need an introduction. The stanza ends with a shrug at the "Freudian interpretation," which arrives "with or without" being invited. The poem knows that a foot sliding into a snug opening invites a dirty reading, and it refuses either to push the point or to deny it. That teasing restraint gives the stanza its tone.
The second stanza moves from the shoehorn to its rivals, and the sound does much of the work. "Boots are for those / who toot their own horns" is a small piece of verbal engineering. "Boots" and "toot" share the long *oo* sound, and that sound runs back through "chute," "foot," "shoe," and "two," so the whole poem hums on one vowel. It also puns on the word "horn." The shoehorn's horn is a humble tool. The horn these men toot is boasting. The poem sets the quiet helper against the loud self-promoter, and the helper comes out better.
The bootstrap image does the sharpest work. "Sporting as we know / the handy bootstraps" uses "as we know" to wink at a cliché everyone has heard. Then "so-called / self-made men" lets the doubt show. The poem never argues the point outright. The metaphor argues it by being absurd, since nobody has ever lifted themselves off the ground by tugging on their own boots. Bonta's alternative is "a better metaphor for rising / to their own occasion." That phrase twists "rise to the occasion" and brings back the Freudian joke from the first stanza, which makes the swagger of these men sound faintly ridiculous.
Structurally the poem is free verse with short, plain lines and no regular meter or end rhyme. The sound patterns do the binding instead. "Shoe" and "two" do rhyme, and the two stanzas end on echoing words, "interpretation" and "occasion," with the same closing sound. The second stanza is also a single long sentence that climbs across seven lines and finishes on the word "occasion." The grammar rises just as the self-made men claim to.
The poem is significant because it manages to be silly and pointed at once. It treats an object we barely notice as a model of interdependence. A shoehorn does nothing alone, and it claims no credit. It stands next to the foot and makes the entry easier, then goes back in the closet. Set against the bootstrap story, that role seems more honest. The word "men" in "self-made men" is also worth noticing. The target is the particular figure of the boastful man who forgets everyone who helped him. By the end, the shoehorn has become the poem's quiet moral argument for admitting that we get by with help.