Roberta Senechal de la Roche
The Red Shoes
At sundown
if no one is watching,
I wear my dead
mother’s little shoes
red patent leather, gilt
buckles, audacious
heels pristine,
intact.
When I look down
she is here again
just now, elegant
in winter’s crystal rooms,
program clenched
in black-gloved hands,
impeccable
someone at her elbow,
transparent, guiding her
to the door that opens up
behind the stage.
Light does not escape from her
closet full of shoes,
like an opaque rainbow
in the dark, waiting
for someone else to dance.
Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Micmac and French Canadian descent, and was born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Virginia, and is Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. Her chapbook, Blind Flowers, won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize, and her latest chapbook, Winter Light, will be published in 2018 by David Robert Press – who also will publish her first full-length volume, Going Fast, in 2019.
The Red Shoes
At sundown
if no one is watching,
I wear my dead
mother’s little shoes
red patent leather, gilt
buckles, audacious
heels pristine,
intact.
When I look down
she is here again
just now, elegant
in winter’s crystal rooms,
program clenched
in black-gloved hands,
impeccable
someone at her elbow,
transparent, guiding her
to the door that opens up
behind the stage.
Light does not escape from her
closet full of shoes,
like an opaque rainbow
in the dark, waiting
for someone else to dance.
Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an historian, sociologist, and poet of Micmac and French Canadian descent, and was born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains. She graduated from the University of Southern Maine and the University of Virginia, and is Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review; Yemassee, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. Her chapbook, Blind Flowers, won the 2016 Arcadia Press Chapbook Prize, and her latest chapbook, Winter Light, will be published in 2018 by David Robert Press – who also will publish her first full-length volume, Going Fast, in 2019.