I don’t know who Tracy is. She could be me. She could be you. She came to me in one of those sublimely ridiculous dreams that refuses to die in the morning. In the dream, Bob Dylan was singing a song about a fast-pitch softball player trying to stay clean. The only line that made it through waking was, “she could throw that ball right through the prison wall.” Anyway, this is what I made of it later:
Tracy
Tracy had a dream of flying
Far above the walls that bound her
Slip the ancient chains around her
Just to be without explaining or defying
In her dream she soared so lightly
Far above the arid highlands
Of the desolated islands
Where the fate she left below her burned so brightly
But somehow the sky betrayed her
In her veins there burned a fire
An unquenchable desire
To still the discontentment deep inside her
Now Tracy dreams of dying
In the old abandoned doorway
That once opened to the heartbreak
That she flew away and left behind so blithely