After Catullus and Horace

only the manners of centuries ago can teach me

how to address you my lover as who you are

O Sestius, how could you put up with my children

thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror

it doesn't matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery

or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke

I wouldn't sleep with you or any man if you paid me

and most of you poets don't have the cash anyway

so please rejoin your fraternal books forever

while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn

who might've been induced to digitalize a part of you

were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness

it's good to live without a refrigerator! why bother

to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?

and of the lonesome Sappho. let's have it warm for now.

Source: A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992)