The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter

The sea scrolls out in a metallic sheen,
flat as the sky and with nowhere to go.
I summon the foam that seems to rise
like ghosts from an Ouija board,
flattening the roots of these warped rocks
that hold the lighthouse in its place—
a snuffed-out candle lost to time,
an obsolete monument of peeled paint
and withered boards sheered
by stray patches of wind.

A distant ship lowers its shadow
across the lip of the horizon
and a slant of silver dulls its blade
against the shore where I picked
through the isthmus of stone
and dark chambers as a child:
an interloper into your private world.

Your incandescent candle shut me out:
how you adored the songs
these tides sang to you.
You preferred to hear their dirges,
brooding alone at the sun-washed horizon,
than anything else on earth.
And how the fog crowded around you,
a cloak to protect your solitude.
Even when you were home you still longed
for the sea and for the howl of the ships
that were your sole companions.

And how I hated that sea!
And the boats and the liners and the cold
mists and the winds that blew dry leaves
like dust and hid them in the crags
of stone I used to hide in,
and the snows that feathered the boughs
of these crooked pines
and the filigrees of ice in the trenches
filled with brine.

Dogs and grandchildren now clamber up
the freezing slopes of my childhood;
crawling like crabs, they believe it amazing
that I was ever a child at all.
Sorrow that you never knew them
beats at the bruises of my heart.

My memories of you are all I have,
not even an old photograph, yellowed
over time, a wrinkle crossing off
the face of a stranger.
But, no matter. Tomorrow
the rains will come
and bang the ocean like a hollow drum.