Epigraph

It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows

open to the garden, about the cesspool.

Virginia Woolf

Lord keep my memory green!

Charles Dickens

However vast the darkness

we must supply our own light.

Stanley Kubrick

I thought of that person,

him or her, as taking me to a country

far high sunny where I knew to be happy

was only a moment, a puttering flame in the fireplace but burning all the misery to cinders

if it could, a sift of dross like what we mourn for as caskets sink with horrifying blandness

into a roar, into smoke, into light, into almost nothing.

The not quite nothing I praise it and I write it.

Edwin Morgan

O, she’s warm!

Wil iam Shakespeare