Jack and Jill were not killed
by their mishap;
though Jack now suffers migraines
for which he consults a psychologist on Tuesday
mornings while Jill attends her pottery class.
They
found out that it was the nitrates in the well
and now they have large bottles of spring water
delivered on Thursdays;
and they rarely fall.
But
Jack and Jill have a problem relationship
and are planning a trial separation:
they are going
to move into separate apartments but plan
to remain friends:
they both want to be writers
and need their own space.
Jill writes poetry,
though she doesn’t like to call herself a poet,
and
she plans to write a series of poems about how
Jack controlled and brutalized her with his thing;
she
equates nature with freedom and their apartment
with oppression;
she is moving to the Annex and will buy
a number of large plants and no longer eat meat,
except
for fish occasionally.
Jack feels that he
is a very different kind of poet:
he doesn’t believe in
nature and will write his poems in the cafes,
finding
in the streetlamps and passersby the images
for his emptiness and for the tragedy of his failed
love for Jill;
he will move into a different part
of the Annex;
he plans to take up reading when he
has the time.
Both Jack and Jill have studied
the markets for poetry:
they know that,
if only
they could get started,
they could do better.
They
plan to write short imagistic pieces:
Jack wants to
experiment with the way the words are placed upon
the paper;
Jill will add psychological twists
to her poems.
If the small magazines won’t take their
work,
they plan to start their own
publications:
many of their friends have already
published small magazines.
But all of this will
take some time:
first their new apartments must be
set up,
their lives put back in order;
but already
Jack has signed up for a poetry-therapy workshop
and is planning his first piece;
and Jill has begun
to write in the journal she abandoned some years before.
Jack and Jill did eventually publish
several poems each,
and Jill in some of the more
respected magazines.
Jack later became an editor
for Maclean-Hunter publications and took up haiku
as a hobby;
Jill became too busy to write,
but
found her career as a social worker just
as satisfying.
They never saw each other again,
except
once at a distance,
at a poetry reading by ‘Peggy’
Atwood.
This is a very sad story,
but it is non-violent
and it doesn’t rhyme.