See, it’s a blast, and then it’s over. 

The ending’s making its approach, but not as  

I hoped. I thought maybe the Panthers  

win state and after the music, the parade,  

time takes a turn, spring night walks the street 

out of traffic, folks look up at each other 

from where they lie in the grass, I feel 

the air they move lifting a blanket to lay 

on the lawn, lifting to fold, leave with,  

I can’t tell. I can’t see the difference. I’m too  

close, and it’s probably dangerous  

mistaking interregnum for afterwards,  

but it was a happy one, so I  

let the months blow. I ate my cheeseburger, fries.  

I drank my paper coke. I lifted my 

boots off the work floor mats, crossed them on a rail

in the night breeze. I hung that feeling,  

let it unfold before me like a clear, warm 

future. I had such a heart. It gave  

me such a heart, like friendship, a feeling like 

late in the game, upper-concourse seats,  

weeknight college basketball, before conference 

play, listening to a mother in  

a white hoodless final four sweatshirt not so  

quietly explain to her children that 

these people are clapping because they don’t know  

anything about basketball. I 

like that. I like her. There are a lot of things  

I like. I like a car-window-to- 

car-window conversation in the middle  

intersection of a pair of stop-  

sign roads, sun out with a little rain, squinting  

while we talk. I like a tower in 

LA, I like a tower in Chicago,  

I like a tower in Manhattan  

most of all, a tower at 345  

Park Avenue where Dana, back to 

a closed door, back sliding down a window, a 

door window, door with a window, where 

Dana told Natalie all of it, and fast  

as a stack of angel-hair pasta  

slides out its box and into a pot, fast as  

I locked the deadbolt on our not-so- 

solid apartment door on Evergreen Ave,  

and slid the black and silver graphic  

disc back into the dvd tray, as cold  

and alone as it goes, gets, winter  

Connecticut River Valley wind blown down  

into Hartford, against the walls, lit  

with tv light, where Dan slammed his door before  

he paused, took a breath, clean and tough as  

a skyline, and told all of it to Isaac, 

Isaac, who, alone, quietly clicked closed his  

office, like a cube of ice dropping  

in and drifting round a tumbler, while he looked  

off into the way things ought to be,  

and knew, and knew how to tell us, in our own  

time, how to shut a door, how to walk  

down a hallway with W.G Snuffy Walden’s 

riff mondrianing you, me, us back  

to the bullpen’s open door, where Casey, at  

last, looked up at us, and said nothing.