The Defeatists

Now on a gray-rained Sunday I refuse
to care at all.
The record I’ve put on has some small voice
entangled in the blues.
How did the poet put it? Dying
with a dying fall.

The coffee’s good. The fruit is sweet.
The fan goes overhead.
Conscience says why worry when you know
that you, like all of us, will meet
an end wherein you’re irrevocably dead.

Once a Patrician breakfasting in Rome
chewed a date
and plucked a passing berry
from a slave-held plate.
He’d once met Caesar, who was not
quite as statuesque as everyone had thought.

And once in warm July a chubby Louis wrote
Aujourd’hui, rien.
Undressed himself and went to bed.
He dreamt of his pale wife’s expensive throat.
And then.