We Are The Light by Gary Aro Ruble
Mark O'Flynn
The Lighthouse-Keeper
The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
whose large blind leaves grow even without light.
~ Pablo Neruda
Beyond the jagged graph of that distant
point
made pale by salt, along the coast
which may be any,
the next.
The further south you go past
Maldonado the more primitive the rocks.
Even the beaches here are coarse
with their beginning dissolution, the foot
prints limp the littoral arc in one direction only
among the smooth bones of shells.
In the foretold revision of the world
trees will split
to their pith, and the phloem shall pulse
like the throb in a broken finger
The claws of mudcrabs protrude
from their fingerholes that the tide
forever blankets, then strips to a quartz moon.
Further along that impossible shoreline
beneath the incorrigible stars, the lighthouse
stands like a crumbling plinth in a time before light.
Leaning slightly askew
on the palsy of its fossilized wick.
It has been told in the village
that on nights of the new
moon, when the sealice glow,
seas shall rise and all flesh and sinew
bequeathed to the ocean floor
shall erupt in a fishmonger’s resurrection
and at the highest tide collectively rot.
Such tales still foment in the village
from the apocryphal time of the great Maldonado
wreck when the loose bodies of young men rolled
over each other all night to the rough beat of the undertow
against the smear of shore.
The lighthouse keeper’s wife,
(he had gone to Rocha), hauled what corpses
she could, leaving tracks like the laboured
nesting of turtles in the sand,
where the Plimsoll line of blood
settled and congealed in them.
Yet the sun approached.
The stormnumbed birds in the trees like a jury
reserving their judgment.
A tug-o-war with the crabs crepitating
in the dawn - one seemed to wave at her
a human finger.
Until he, the husband,
returned, aghast, to help her stack them three deep
in the cellar with the sweet potatoes and the wine;
cyanotic and pungent as strange new tubers.
They kept floating in for days.
So it seemed did their cries,
which were also the cries of gulls
squatting fat on the dome of the lighthouse,
gorged on this new guilt.
The priest from Maldonado had to sit
and be fanned.
All the lettuces withered.
And the light which had been their duty
so the authorities decried,
had never shone upon that moonless sea.
Lonely yachts approached after the
newsmen
had taken what they wanted, and went away again.
Once an injured whale, followed by shrieking petrels,
had the fortitude to beach itself among the smooth stones.
Its jaw bone taken by an enterprising shopkeeper
to frame a portal.
In time the little picket fence
fell down, crabs came clacking to the door,
and the words she kept for others also dried up
in a language made otiose.
Even the echoes of gossip diminished
amongst the hagfaced profiles of the cliffs.
The lighthouse keeper went once again to Rocha
with a list and this time did not return.
Because he left the wine in the cellar
the wife did not suspect the worst,
but of course there was a woman
and the lighthouse keeper’s wife,
who now assumed the role
because that is what she had always done,
wept herself hoarse on Saints days
and collected the tears in a phial.
One night the foundry of a glowing
comet
streaked across the sky, extinguished
itself like a name in the sizzling sea.
The bay turned rancid.
The honey from the hive a little sour.
Fish rose from the depths
with monstrous forms and her long
dead babes returned to her in dreams,
coated in salt, caught in the tumble
of ruined rocks at either end of the beach.
The crabs scuttling from the hills
on their spawning
migration drew closer, fought in the yard.
Sometimes they died, one atop the other with pincers
interlocked in their struggle for the water,
all without words.
She dared not turn her back on the
sea
which spoke to her with every sibilant nuance of the tide;
its shushing and malice.
Resigned herself over time to the scrape
of shingle, as of footsteps,
to her lettuces, as of sustenance,
to the waves’ conversation
and the murmuring history of the wind.
While from the cloudless heavens
all about her, birds, birds,
birds.
Bio:
Mark O'Flynn is an Australian writer who has published a novel, a play, and two books of poetry. He writes across a variety of forms and has had eight plays produced in Australia. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife and two children.
