Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.

I'll tell you a story
About Jack a Nory;
And now my story's begun;
I'll tell you another
Of Jack and his brother,
And now my story is done.

Because I am not married, I have the skin of an orange

that has spent its life in the dark. Inside the orange I am blind.
I cannot tell when a hand reaches in and breaks

the atoms of the blood. Sometimes a blackbird will bring the wind

into my hair. Or the yellow clouds falling on the cold floor
are animals fighting each other

out of their drifting misery. All the women I have known

have been ruined by fog and the deer crossing the field at night.

The startling pleasures all broke down,
It was her first arthritic spring.
Inside her furs, her bones, secure,
Suddenly became a source of pain
And froze on a Saturday afternoon
While she was listening to “La Boheme.”

Strength had been her weakness, and
Because it was, she got to like
The exhilaration of catastrophes
That prove our lives as stupid as we think,
But pain, more stupid than stupidity,
Is an accident of animals in which, once caught,
The distances are never again the same.