The beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dying
but could still enter into random conversations with strangers,
random but also deliberate, so impressions of the world
were still forming and changing you,

and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer
though by then everything was happening more slowly -
boutiques, restaurants, a little wine shop with a striped awning,
once a cat was sleeping in the doorway;
it was cool there, in the shadows, and I thought

I would like to sleep like that again, to have in my mind
not one thought. And later we would eat polpo and saganaki,
the waiter cutting leaves of oregano into a saucer of oil -
What was it, six o’clock? So when we left it was still light

and everything could be seen for what it was,
and then you got in the car-
where did you go next, after those days,
where although you could not speak you were not lost?