Tied in the Seventh

should we walk him?
(you & your many words)
what good would it do?
the day is a shower of errors
(I know you in your gray
machine, lessening the distance
between us—don't tell me
this isn't true love)
he grounds out to first
but the runner advances
finally the time ends
no runs scored (somewhere in
the vague lands between this room
and Illinois' southern tip
you are thinking of me)

but still no decision
one to one tie
it's the bottom of the seventh
(when will you be here?)

Interesting use of baseball as a metaphor. I watched the cubs pretty incessantly from 1974-1980. Of course this poem is from the period when Alison lived in southern Illinois outside of Carbondale. Her husband went to school, civil engineering, at SIU-C. She often drove up to Springfield, several hours on the backroads, to the other parts of her life that she kept in town. I believe this poem references a grey fastback type of car, a gremlin, that she had about this time. Later on she acquired a karman ghia. We really had a very weird, fucked up love affair going in those days. I was part of it, and pretty demanding, but she was like a person living many different lives. I think about her sort of as Neal Cassady, carrying on with different people in different rooms at the same time. She once wrote a poem about keeping the pieces of her life in different boxes. No doubt that was true.