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 Seatter

 

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