Strindberg in London

My new wife fills the bed, fills every room, tells me
it will all be fine. Dragged through other people’s lives,
pursued through my own. What will I remember?
Only this. Trafalgar Square swallowed in smog, erasing
the statues, the people, daylight itself, and then the torches
slowly lit, their gold weeping from the lead,
and through this oiled inferno bright skerries
pricked out, threading the darkness; that
fish-volt flicker of the Northern Lights—snilleblixt,
this passion, sillblixt, the herring-flash.