Frank Ormsby

Working with one eye closed or heads buried under their drapes, they focus to preserve the drowned shell-hole, the salient's rubble of dead, the bleached bones of sepoys torn from the earth. Their stills haunt us: a stretcher piled with skulls at Cold Harbour, graves in a barren wood that in one hour's carnage lost its name to history and the world's memory of death. The worst has happened, they confirm the worst: but show us too the makeshift hospital, the sad errand of the hospital van among the ruins. Also enough of sky to suggest the infinity of angles, that behind sandbags, under the hostile towers someone is finding time for a wry note on bowel movements, an entry that affirms the loved salience of what is always there: flower of Auschwitz, bird of the Western Front.

The flypaper hung from the ceiling cork- screws with the weight of dead bluebottles. Not a smidgeon of dust anywhere, the house burdened with an unbearable tidiness that means he will not return.

The letters still come for Mrs Watters, who must, at one time, have warmed this house and lived as we do. Mostly small matters — the rolled calendar that, had she stayed, might hang now where I drew the rusted nail, the catalogues, the last gas bill unpaid — and always Mrs Watters. So for me the spirit of the house is feminine, its whisper of the one who, constantly, draws letters that assume she has never gone. On which I weekly write, without conviction: 'No longer living here. Address unknown.'

The first act of love in a new house is not private. Loving each other we are half-aware of door and mirror. Our ecstasy includes the bedside chair, the air from the landing. Street-lamp and elm utter leaves on walls as in no room ever. Theirs is the tongue our tongues join in translating. Their message is clear: tonight you cannot ignore the world at the window. So we love in the knowledge of a city at a different angle. And sharing our bed with furniture and tree we claim their perspective, merging our lives here in their established frame.

The lights come on and stay on under the trees. Visibly a whole neighborhood inhabits the dusk, so punctual and in place it seems to deny dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray, the porch lamps promise. Sudden, as though a match failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs trouble the eye. Impossible not to share that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now dalliance with night, such soothing relentlessness. What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style? Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves, winged and at random! Our flickery might-have-beens come up form the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be as tentative frolic! What do fireflies say? That loneliness made of light becomes at last convivial singleness? That any antic spark cruising the void might titillate creation? And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground, or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom, for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence, less than it seemed, as childless and deprived as Chaos and Old Night. But ruffled, too, as though it unearthed some memory of light from its long blackout, a hospitable core fit home for fireflies, brushed by fireflies' wings.