Our risk is not that we keep warm at night,
But that we may not work as long as there is light.
—Robert Bhain Campbell
Do we choose what to remember? Maybe
It’s the act of remembering rather
Than the thing remembered that’s important:
That we should obtain some task, though daunting
Or obscure, to give meaning to our life,
Adding in that way to universal sense
And sensibility, absent before.
The spider spins its web remembering
That it must needs persist if it's to eat,
Then eats what turns up—or mummies the thing
For such nice offspring as it may conceive.
So I, too, labor, producing these lines,
Hoping, perhaps, for progeny in time
Let loose in fancy, whether yours or mine.
Epigraph: Robert Bhain Campbell, “Crime and Counter-Crime,” in The Task (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), 9. Campbell died of cancer on December 3, 1940, aged of twenty-eight, leaving just this posthumous collection.