A Southward Tide

I want to live a simpler time
and a simpler place
where stoplights are flags waved at random
across a plaza of crisscrossing horses

I want to journey a hundred miles by carriage
where ruts of mud splinter wheels
and dandelions in the fields
they grow for the picking

I want the priest who marries me
to have a garden
and a mistress
and a son

I want the boat that floats my ashes out to sea
to have a high wooden mast
and a lass upon a widow’s walk
measuring time by the ocean’s setting sun

I want no man to know the mysteries of my soul

Alas I live not in a simple time nor place

Instead the plaza has green and red soldiers
that flash their lights in combat
at compact cars and buses

at the sailor’s wife with her Italian lover
and the preacher pawning fortunes by telephone

and at me barefoot and lost in the midnight lane
street lamps alighting my soul for all to see

my time is an intricate intersection

a tangle of crisscrossing wires
like inside out carcasses
I cannot recognize my end from your beginning

and mystery is a windblown dandelion
wafting upwards for us to watch,
stopped static in the plaza
by a red soldier waving his flag of war.