Wanted: Lighthouse Keeper
This is not the job for those who wish to impress their friends
or disappoint their parents. You will not stand firm in danger
or watch for storms. You will not light the candles or tend
the flame with wood or coal or oil. Lighthouses are electric now.
We control them from afar. Don’t fool yourself you’re saving lives.
Your pants will be too long and have big pockets. You will wear
a tweed cap and a fisherman’s sweater with unraveling sleeves.
You will become fluent in the language of rust. We will not require
that you study fog–or any reason vessels shatter on your rocks.
You will not need to tell tales to tourists of shipwrecks and spectors.
That’s not your job. We will ask you to sweep the winding stairs.
We recommend painting seascapes in oils and perfecting stews.
Bonus points if you play the Japanese flute. Learn to knit. Tie knots
you’ll never use. Bring your guidebooks to seabirds and tidepools.
Pretend to know how to fix engines without the help of YouTube.
Duties include looking pensively out to sea through a telescope
and studying insects drawn to your light. Widows are welcome.
Partners need not apply. Children must be dead or grown. May we
recommend a standoffish cat who can eat delicately around fish
bones? Make friends with barnacles. Become fluent in foghorn.
You are allowed to be filled with longing–just not your own.
Claim you don’t have cell reception and hand-write letters that speak
only of tides, sea lions, and the little herb garden on the back stoop.
Learn the language of light: illumination is measured in candelas.
A loom of the light is the impossible way a lighthouse beam hovers
above earth’s curve, a gift of water vapor. Blinking on-on-on-off-
on-on-on-off is occulting light, as if we are tempting ghosts. A steady
light is fixed. Though you will have no one to teach, study the way
light travels. This is not work for the young, although, for a time,
you will be a refuge to someone young. They will stay in the little
room with the single bed and musty quilt and crooked painting
of the sailboat. They will sleep and eat your stew and paint the stairs
and change the rusted screws. They will not ask questions. They
need your steadiness more than advice. They’ll stare out rain-streaked
windows and let the lonely call of the gulls echo in their empty
chests until they are full enough. They are not yet healed–that will
take a lifetime–but they are ready. On the last day, they’ll ask your
full name. Must refuse to remove swallows’ clay nests from lighthouse
walls. Must love bats at dusk. Contrary to popular belief, you will not
be required to smoke a pipe. We pay in sand dollars and postcards
from grateful visitors who remember conversations you never had.
