After
By Stephen Dunn
Jack and Jill at home together after their fall,
the bucket spilled, her knees badly scraped,
and Jack with not even an aspirin for what’s broken.
We can see the arduous evenings ahead of them.
And the need now to pay a boy to fetch the water.
Our mistake was trying to do something together,
Jill sighs. Jack says, If you’d have let go for once
you wouldn’t have come tumbling after.
He’s in a wheelchair, but she’s still an item--
for the rest of their existence confined
to a little, rhyming story. We tell it to our children,
who laugh, already accustomed to disaster.
We’d like to teach them the secrets
of knowing how to go too far,
but Jack is banging with his soup spoon,
Jill is pulling out her hair. Out of decency
we turn away, as if it were possible to escape
the drift of our lives, the fundamental business
of making do with what’s been left us.
