Keepers

Keepers 

six steps up

lubec, maine

My hope is that this minuscule prayer

will reach out to the god unknown I just sensed

passing in the rivulet of breeze above the mere rivulet

of water in this small arroyo.  To the skittering insect

this place is as large as the Sea of Galilee.

                                                Jim Harrison

                                                Small Gods

Before automation, before, when the fog

would come in or the heavy mist or the high

seas were sensed  and the light arrived like

a conjuring, when the keeper had to

climb the tower and light the fire that would

guide the men through the coming and going

seas, feet between each metal stair and hand-

wrought tread with its lack of backing, that went

deep into the air, that went straight up and straight

down in the brick cylinder, I imagine

looking out with his eyes, and too with his wife’s

eyes, who both stay awake, he with his lit wick,
she with her midnight bread. Both of them, fingers
sticky or slick with soot or with flour,
lubricant and a whiff of kerosene,
up the wrists with a sudden flip and push,

flip and push, like he’s drawing on a small
pipe and she’s exhaling all her weight in-
to the flattening of every pocket
and lung of air rising up, the sea or
the dough.  He’s cupping a flame to

the bowl of his pipe, she’s pushing her body
into the frame of the table he made
years ago in his off time.  It’s blond with age,
this wood’s particular gray—and days and days

they eat separately, he in cleaning the Fresnel
lens, keeping meticulous minutes with
barometers, from wind meters, she with need-
les, with modest preening, and each completes
something: he his log, she another dainty

lace doily she’ll read and then donate to
the church bazaar come summer.  It’s a quiet
life, mostly, this kind of keeping.  The beam

of it, perpetually lit, penetrates
the deepest despair, like a hand at the end

of a solid arm plunging into
the molasses black of a fogbound August
night, when the men in the haddock-full boat don’t
know where now to row, and go down after
breaking up and plunging into the Fundy
water.  And by simply knowing where, that hand,

that wrist, that elbow and right up the shoulder
knows, no groping, and grips the exact spot
on the paused throb of the shocked muscle. 

To ease it toward shore.  To coax it back through
to life.  Like the wife who touches him when

he’s done with this particular storm, touches
his temple where the grease of the wick still
smudges, and she rubs it, and he her, where flour
still, a curl of hair still, a gloss of oil.