The Lighthouse Keeper

On occasion, when the mood takes him

as it so often does, he will put down

his papers, get up from his kindly old chair,

and leave for a while the sweeping beam

to sow its charitable seed — that seed which,

when falling on the ground

of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness,

ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance.

He descends then, the long corkscrew of

the stairs and opens at their base the metal door

so that he may take a closer look at what might

be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always

finds the churning world, she laps at him from

every side with no respite, and spatters him

with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation,

a tone which he adopted long ago

when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes,

there is no danger here from neither shark

nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is

like a dressing-up box with whimsy.

Indeed, were there such creatures hidden

neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves,

they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums

and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling

knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is

that as he gazes out, he cannot help

but wonder what it is he might be warning of

with the light that turns atop his tower,

because that tower is itself in fact the only

hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her

wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy

blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.