原版英文故事與詩歌：The Bright Dresses

The bright dressesAfter your addio - breathless, banal, the click

of the telephone, I came out into Corso Vittorio

Emmanuele. Milan's glorious main street:

rows of posh shoe shops, buckles and toecaps

on tip toe behind thick glass; at the end of the

boulevard the cathedral spires like the tails of

old seahorses: rigid, brittle and upside down;

sunlight all round me in a hot, close envelope,

with its smell of coffee and expensive briefcases;

words on the air from the English lesson I had

just been teaching: "Sylvia never arrives late.

Tom loves pop music and small dogs."

This is the present simple for habit. It goes on

and on I was saying. Then down the road

they came: three bright dresses in yellow, pink

and peacock blue, blurring to blobs of floating

colour inside the tears in my eyes. They jangled

the words, advanced unbearably bright towards

me: Sylvia loves pop music. Tom never arrives

late. Small dogs. Small dogs. Never. Loves.

by Robert SeatterWith kind permission of the poet, previously published in Poetry as a Foreign Language, edited by Martin Bates, White Adder Press, 1999