Habit
The child in bed, a first drink poured,
we sink with the same pneumatic sigh
into a couch that set us back
(but was, we say, a prudent purchase)
and catalogue our daily virtues:
You kept our boy alive (the trick
is knowing all the ways to die),
while I wrote copy and ignored
how foolish, how patently absurd
it is to work a life away—
building a wall up, brick by brick,
against the nothing that approaches.