Inspired by: a conservator's notes on an Italian Herbal, circa 1500, housed at the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont; bandaged stone figures at the twelfth-century Cloister of Saint Trophime in Arles, France; photographs of Warsaw, Poland, after the World War II bombings there; and visits to the sites of forest fires and firestorms in the western United States. "The difference/Between a moment/And a memory/Is the loss,/A mass grave of facts./Repair is necessary." This is volume one of Burgess's series, "The Stratigraphic Archives."