The Lighthouse

I don't come clean easy and I don't
stink much although I've known a few shadows who do.
They live in the brightness. They die there.

I used to think, no. Let the lighthouse spin round and round...
Let the voice
leak out of the fog. Sometimes by simply standing

I create more others, shirts in the window,
breakfast of invisible stars. The lake shifts under its altar
of wet sills, like a starling woman, feathers

over her arms moving away through the rain,
small clouds. My brother, almost born,
calls me on most of this stuff. You're talking to the furnace again,

he might say. Or What's with the flashlight pendulum?
Be he loves the lake the way I do, no words,
but also no pins in a map. He lives in the brightness,

which I sometimes glimpse when the lighthouse
(or my watch) glows in the dark.
It's like a light shining through water, a harbor.



-- David Dodd Lee

from Arrow Pointing North