原版英文故事與詩歌：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