Chapter 5

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and count all the mumblings of sour age at a penny’s fee. Suns can set and rise again:

we when once our brief light has set must sleep through a perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses, and then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then another thousand without resting, then a hundred.

Then, when we have made many thousands, we will confuse the count lest we know the numbering, so that no one can cast an evil eye on us through knowing the number of our kisses.