Eight short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and Dave Bonta still fits in a row of coffins, a statement of faith and a joke at his own expense. The poem begins among the dead and ends at the table. Between the two, the speaker admits that believing in life is easier to announce than to do.
The opening stanza is carefully chosen. The coffins are never named. They are "fine hard boxes," and the plain, almost childlike phrase makes them stranger and colder than the word "coffin" would. "Fine" can mean well-made and expensive, the polish we give the dead, but it also sounds faintly ironic, as if everything has been tidied up. "Hard" is the opposite of the living, yielding body. Then comes "harmlessly," which gets a line to itself, and its four soft syllables seem to lie down on the page. The dead can no longer hurt anyone, and the word carries a quiet suggestion that these "old people" may once have had the power to. It is gentle and a little sad, because to be harmless is also to be powerless. The last word of the stanza, "lie," can be read two ways: they lie down, and they lie there looking arranged and peaceful, perhaps more peaceful than anyone really is.
Then the poem turns on one small word: "yet I believe in wine and cake." This is the whole poem's hinge, and it gets a stanza of one line. The phrasing is that of a creed, "I believe in," but what the speaker believes in is a party. Wine has an old religious echo, yet cake is a deliberate step down from bread, sweeter and more frivolous. It is a faith with no heaven in it, only pleasure here and now. The sound quietly backs this up. "Fine" in the first stanza and "wine" in the second nearly rhyme, so the elegant coffin and the glass are linked, as if one answers the other. The long *i* sound runs through the whole poem: "fine," "lie," "I," "believe," "wine," "I." The speaker's voice keeps returning, and the poem never lets him off the hook.
Just when the creed sounds settled, the ending undercuts it. "At the banquet I was jealous / of my stomach." The poem never says what the banquet is for. The coffins make a funeral meal one possible reading, but that is an inference. What matters is that the cake has turned into a banquet and the abstract belief has become a physical scene. The line break leaves "jealous" hanging for a moment, and then the object arrives, absurd and funny. The speaker splits himself in two: the mind that watches, thinks about the boxes and perhaps feels awkward, and the stomach, which simply gets on with enjoying itself. The stomach does not brood on mortality. Gusto, the title's word for zest and relish, belongs to it and not to the "I."
The joke has a sting. The speaker has just declared his faith in wine and cake and then finds that his body is better at that faith than he is. The stomach, of course, is as mortal as the rest of him and will end up in a box like everyone else. So the part of him with the most gusto is also the part that is closest to the "fine hard boxes." The poem does not point this out, but it is there.
The form helps. The poem has no rhyme or regular meter, and its stanzas shrink from three lines to one to two, like a thought narrowing toward a confession. The diction is almost entirely everyday, short words with only "harmlessly" and "banquet" stretching out, so that the poem sounds like someone speaking quietly rather than someone delivering wisdom.
The poem is significant because it takes the old subject of death next to pleasure and refuses both gloom and sermon. It does not tell us to seize the day. It shows someone trying to and being slightly outdone by his own digestion. That honesty is what makes the belief in wine and cake feel earned, and it leaves us with a smile and a small unease.