people leave and no highway will bring them back

October 15
-- by David Lehman

Before I read your
poem, dear Charles
I'd have planned on
Keats at second base
Shelly at short
Wordsworth in center
Coleridge in left
Byron at first base
John Clare in right
Leigh Hunt at third
Blake catching and
Whitman a surprise
starter on the mound
with Poe available
for short relief
in Yankee Stadium
where the October shadows
lengthen in left field
as Yogi Berra once put it
it gets late early there