The bright dresses

This poem is about teaching English and conveys powerful emotions through observation of small, almost banal details: shoes in shoe shops, bright dresses, the artificial language of an English lesson.

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The bright dresses

After 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 Seatter

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