It Could Happen To You

It’s June 15, 2017, a Thursday,
fortieth anniversary of the infamous day
the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati
and they’re still losing

I mean we are

7 to 1 to the Washington Nationals
a team that didn’t exist in 1977
the summer of a little tour in France
with Henry James
in a yellow Renault douze

the light a lovely gray
the rain a violin
concerto (Prokofiev’s No. 2 in D Major)
and I had books to read

Huxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F. R. Leavis
Empson a little dull for my taste
also Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,
James Baldwin in Paris
Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground” Part 1

and John Ashbery tells me he is reading “The Possessed”
translated as “The Demons” in the newfangled translation
while Ron and I stay faithful to Constance Garnett

I went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherries
admired the outline of trees in the dark

and Rosemary Clooney
sang “It Could Happen to You”

and I was a healthy human being, not a sick man
for the first summer in three years.