Remember when Jack changed girls year by year?
And how we talked it up—and talked it down?
Our tongues deliberated every sigh and vow.
Let no fact go unlubricated to its grave,
no innuendo stay unmaterialized:
real dirt was the grist our guts required.
Gossip grain by grain was how we earthworms prayed
—communion with clay that churned up ground of being
into sweaty partoosies of particulars:
Who was carrying the torch? Who was tinder?
Who had the ball? the balls? the gism? the juice?
Who had it? the speck? the spark? the dough? the power?
we wanted to know—since we knew it was somewhere.
And where was it going? Who'd have it tomorrow?
Remember that? And don't you remember when
dear Jill's affairs were everyone's affair?
 
Then history moved on, went off to live
in other loins and pairings of pantings.
Hear that furor of rumors rumbling underground?
Not elegies, for sure, but music of
the new historians' delirious mucosa.
Our chatter's like this here crumbling incoherence.
Our cohort's down and done for. So who gives a damn
about these temporary contemporaries
—not you, not I—now that Jack's nurse changes Jack,
and Jill, still carrying on, changes doctors!