Into Future

"The next to last poem is about a young married woman and mother who is plainly having what it refers to here in my old marriage manual as an extramarital love affair. ...she comes into the poem just when that cornet of his is doing something extraordinarily effective, and I see her as a terribly pretty girl, moderately intelligent, immoderately unhappy, and not unlikely living a block or two away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She comes home very late one night from a tryst--in my mind, blearly and lipstick smeared--to find a balloon on her bedspread. Someone has simply left it there. The poet doesn't say, but it can't be anything but a large, inflated toy balloon, probably green, like Central Park in spring."