It Could Happen To You

David Lehman (2019)

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 Ashberry 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.