In Ancient Times

by Peter Money

In Ancient Times
          — for Chris Busa

You were standing over the raft
(it was low tide and the raft was
idle),

the one you named once you’d moored it:
“Blind Date” — optimistically a ship to sail
but this one with a stagnant destination.

On an island of sand still
where water was around
a glass & bottle on white bird scat,

you and all of it
emblems against usurpation
— the summer people’s super powered craft display;

there you stared away
to sea — & back
toward a home one row from the view.

Inside shoreline cottages, each lit
for evening, stairways & tables
had filled with yearly strangers.

A seagull sang
ragtime’s song of the rusty wheel,
warped & carrying a heavy load

in a great solitarian novel,
one with the traveling corpse
bellowing against silence

. . . and it was you,
in another life,
hauling stones down and unbuilt road.