Breakfast on Strathmore

I pick up the paper in the early wash of day
to read about the steady current of events
carving tragic streams—though we thought tragedy impossible
in these grey and heroless times. We sit trying to hearken back
to the hush of a better time, you fumble through the Times and turn
to world affairs. I fix myself a black coffee

and bring yours, remembering how you always spoil coffee
with two sugars and a cream. We talk about our day,
our plans, a little politics— so you fidget and you turn
away slightly. It’s clear we agree in principle, but events
don’t unfold as you say. This is how it goes—I’m talking at your back
or into the sports page. Breakfast with you is always impossible.

You mutter that the suffering in the world is impossible
to fathom. Maybe we should start drinking fair trade coffee.
a feeble suggestion. But, it’s not the world’s problems weighing on your back
I also suggest. Your sneer tells me you’re not up for this game today.
I mean, in today’s day you’d think we could avoid these tragic events
you say as if human beings could, in some fateful turn,

reveal themselves to be angels. I disagree and turn
the subject away from your tragically impossible
pipe dreams and toward the strange and tragic events
I witnessed over a different cup of coffee—
A homeless man with a crown on his head as bright as day
sleeping in our rose bed in the back

yard. I waved at him he waved back.
He rolled out of bed in an awkward turn
Landing him in a throne of begonias and day-
lilies. He got up with regal dignity that seemed impossible
for a vagrant. He rang the bell and asked me for a dollar for some coffee
I obliged and asked him about the unfortunate events

leading to his vagrancy. He relayed the heartbreaking events
with Sophoclean poignancy though his teeth were gone—except for two in back.
He spoke with mad enthusiasm between loud slurps of coffee
about the cruel twists and turns
of fate—though we thought that concept impossible
in today’s grey and heroless day.

So while you sit and lament the world’s events and hope in vain to turn
the world back to a purer time-- It is not completely impossible
for us to speak over coffee of the classical tragedies of our day.