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I first encountered Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning” as a young man in college. Its way of  juxtaposing “morning” pleasures against “evening” concerns—the delights of the body silhouetted against the extinction awaiting us—arrested me. What could it mean for his poem to posit death as “the mother of beauty”? How might the resistless undoing that is our lot be fruitful?

I grasped even then—who does not?—that there is no gainsaying the process of incapacitation awaiting the elderly. Yet Stevens’s protagonist in “Sunday Morning” seems far from anguished about what will be heading her way. Rather than piously spend her Sunday mornings in church—so as to convert the menace of eventual extinction into spiritual transcendence—she relishes the abundant time in the bedroom, the unrushed unfolding of sensuous pleasures: “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair.” Late morning rituals, a currying of the body, with coffee and oranges and sunshine on offer: this—rather than “the holy hush of ancient sacrifice”—is the Sunday morning scenario she dwells on. What is such a leisurely ceremony doing in a poem concerned with human mortality? Doesn’t she know it will end badly?

Strangely enough, my wife and I—both of us in our early 80s—may have come up with an answer beyond the reach of the young. Although we both know perfectly well that it will end badly, we indulge in a daily drama (not just on Sundays!) that echoes the matutinal one envisaged in Stevens’s poem. Our drama typically begins when I awaken around eight a.m. So as not to disturb my wife’s slumber, I tiptoe out of the bedroom and head toward the kitchen. (Our new bedroom is downstairs—same floor as the kitchen. This move downstairs is an alteration prompted—in advance of being necessitated—by our increasing age.) I brew a pot of coffee using the special beans that a friend’s son-in-law roasts and sells here on Martha’s Vineyard, then load a tray with two steaming mugs, and maybe a pastry or two, and make my way back to the bedroom. Most days, this works like a charm. My almost-awake wife will have heard the sound of the coffee bean grinder. She will have fluffed up the pillows on her side of our bed, awaiting my arrival. (She cannot function without this initial cup of coffee; she likes it best in bed.) Every now and then, however, she sleeps through the modest sounds of my rising, leaving, and bean grinding. No problem. I will then return the coffee to the pot and walk into my study to check the overnight email and the day’s weather forecast. Within 20 or 30 minutes at most, my wife awakens. That is my cue: I rise from the computer, return to the kitchen, then come to the bed with the coffee tray.