Why?

    x   to mimic the slow pass
of memory, the glassy recollection of a cheap print
of a painting by Bonnard in the university bedroom
of an old friend.    x      to pass the time:
to go past it, into the space of a page.
    x     as an excuse to sit, handled by the August sun
on a fourth-story Turinese balcony,
swallowed by the late afternoon heat
and Peter Sarstedt playing from inside,
moving your toes in a pool of shade cast
by the laundry drying on the storey above.    x     
to bring tokens of then and now into brief relation,
a lamp-shadowed, concentrating face into the
bright but declining North Italian sunlight.
    x     to prove something false about the endurance
of feeling the sun on one’s face.    x     
...