He woke up in New York City on Valentine's Day, <br />Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm, <br />Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate <br />Said her life wasn't working he looked stricken she said <br />You're all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he <br />She went from being an Ivy League professor of French <br />To an illustrator for a slick midtown magazine <br />They agreed it was his fault. But for now they needed <br />To sharpen to a point like a pencil the way <br />The Empire State Building does. What I really want to say <br />To you, my love, is a whisper on the rooftop lost in the wind <br />And you turn to me with your rally cap on backwards rooting <br />For a big inning, the bases loaded, our best slugger up <br />And no one out, but it doesn't work that way. Like the time <br />Kirk Gibson hit the homer off Dennis Eckersley to win the game: <br />It doesn't happen like that in fiction. In fiction, we are <br />On a train, listening to a storyteller about to reach the climax <br />Of his tale as the train pulls into Minsk, his stop. That's <br />My stop, he says, stepping off the train, confounding us who <br />Can't get off it. "You can't leave without telling us the end," <br />We say, but he is already on the platform, grinning. <br />"End?" he says. "It was only the beginning."<br /><br />David Lehman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ninth-inning/
