Villa Isola Bella

‘You will find Isola Bella in pokerwork on my heart’

KATHERINE MANSFIELD to JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY 10 November 1920 (inscribed outside the Katherine Mansfield memorial room in Menton)

Your villa, Katherine, but not your room,

and not much of your garden. Goods trains boom

all night, a dozen metres from the bed

where tinier tremors hurtle through my head.

The ghost of your hot flat-iron burns my lung;

my throat’s all scorching lumps. I grope among

black laurels and the shadowy date-palm, made

like fans of steel, each rustling frond a blade,

across the gravel to the outside loo

whose light won’t wake my sleeping sister. You

smoked shameless Turkish all through your TB.

I drag at Silk Cut filters, duty-free,

then gargle sensibly with Oraldene

and spit pink froth. Not blood: it doesn’t mean,

like your spat scarlet, that I’ll soon be dead –

merely that pharmacists are fond of red.

I’m hardly sick at all. There’s just this fuzz

that blurs and syncopates the singing buzz

of crickets, frogs, and traffic in my ears:

a nameless fever, atavistic fears.

Disease is portable: my bare half-week

down here’s hatched no maladie exotique;

I brought my tinglings with me, just as you

brought ragged lungs and work you burned to do;

and, as its fuel, your ecstasy-prone heart.

Whatever haunts my bloodstream didn’t start

below your villa, in our genteel den

(till lately a pissoir for passing men).

But your harsh breathing and impatient face,

bright with consumption, must have left a trace

held in the air. Well, Katherine, Goodnight:

let’s try to sleep. I’m switching out the light.

Watch me through tepid darkness, wavering back

past leaves and stucco and their reverent plaque

to open what was not in fact your door

and find my narrow mattress on the floor.