Caroline Price
Emma Bovary' Slipper
A convent girl
who says yes without thinking
to a dull provincial doctor
as if any marriage makes flesh and blood
of the romances that fill her head,
mistress of
indifferent rooms, long afternoons
spent pacing the garden
stepping exactly into the prints
of the page before
might still have resigned herself
but for the chance
invitation on page sixty-three,
her first quadrille after champagne
and ice, the estate of a marquis.
And when, at home again
twelve pages later, she scrupulously
packs away her saffron dress,
her shawl, into a chest
and turns her back on it
she finds the flocked walls
closing in, the plaster cure on the lawn
suddenly too familiar, the maid
insolent. All it takes
is one trace of wax
transferred from a dancing floor
to the sole of a satin slipper,
a yellowish indelible stain
that means it will never be the same again
and the end is inevitable.
Page(s) 38
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