Ted steps into his shorts and ducks his head before their west-facing window, out of potential sight of the rector, who has told them, to their private amusement, that he can see all that goes on at Court Green from his house. Out of the way, also, of the moonlight shafting below the curtain hems and across their bed. Another plane of that same moonlight is most certainly staining Sylvia’s study, the room next door to this, and the desktop Ted sanded for her from an oversized plank of elm last month.

“Why don’t you come here? I think I have a subject to add to your list,” Ted says, looking out the window toward the churchyard that abuts and surmounts their front garden, held in place by a wall of stone-studded cob and a property-line embellishment of tombstones, moved purposely over the decades as wild storms originating over the otherworldly heaths of Dartmoor knocked the relics piecemeal into the grass, forever confusing the ownership of the ancient graves.

Grumbling theatrically, Sylvia extracts herself from the cozy bedclothes. “Which list—” she asks, waddling loose-hipped in her nightgown around the wide bedstead to Ted’s side, “the ‘marvels of Court Green’ list, or the ‘poem potential’ list?”

“Both,” Ted answers, holding the thick corduroy curtains fully back from the mullioned glass.

Before them glows the full luminous moon, blue and silent, unloosing her griefs over the pointed arch of the church’s Gothic yew. Blue clouds cross the moon’s disconsolate face like tissue flowers floated on water. The gravestone fence is up to its crenulated summit in a blue-gray wash of curling mists. The churchyard, everything, is otherwise lost in a netherworld of dry-ice fumes, pouring, as they watch, over the embankment into their yard. Motionless trees float blackly over their foggy property and up the crop-stoned wall, dense as carbon and just as unreadable.