Tell the truth I told me                              When I couldn’t speak.

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship              Or a child

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer

In the 1930s                                         Toward the iron lung of polio.

According to the census I am unmarried                  And unchurched.

                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of ice.

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

For whom left am I first?

                                                       We have come to terms with our Self

Like a marmoset getting out of her Great Ape suit.