A Poem by Julian Stannard

Mistress

Sestri Levante

I arranged to meet Gloria at the Gran Caffé Tritone.
I knew she’d be late so I drank a coffee and waited.
She was sitting there! I hadn’t recognised her!
She’d put on a lot of weight. She was suffering.
As if some old unloved aunt had dropped by.
We kissed — once, twice — and made our way to the sea.
There was a man from Dakar on the beach
selling shells to put around the neck
as well as bangles and beads and silver bracelets
for the ankles and he thought I was Gloria’s
husband — marito — and he asked me whether
I’d like some henna on my lady’s body
and Gloria looked like a holy cow
covered with baubles and trinkets which swayed
and gleamed in the sun.
The man asked, Do you have children?
No, she said and he touched his heart (I’m sorry)
saying it was God’s will and he told us
about the woman in Bangladesh whose womb
had been turned into a durian fruit.
You had to hold your nose as you drew near, he said
but the fruit of her womb was ecstasy.
(Some of this, I think, was lost in translation.)
We walked into the sea — the man with shells shouting
Great Fortune! Great Fortune! and you might have thought
Gloria was a boat as she pushed into the waves
with shells around her neck and bracelets around her
ankles and the henna smudged a little by the water,
and her feet were fused together and she shucked off
the cancer and the fibromyalgia and the weight,
and the girl who used to work at Principe Station
making platform change announcements
who for eighteen years was Lanfranco’s mistress
became what the Italians call a sirena.
She looked at the shore, turning seawards,
swimming out of the Bay of Fables,
the white church tolling its bells across the town
and the coco bello man shouting Coco bello!
Coco bello! And that same morning a boy
from the village was killed on his motorbike.

Julian Stannard’s new collection, Please Don’t Bomb the Ghost of My Brother, comes out from Salt later this year . He teaches poetry at the University of Winchester .