The Lighthouse Keeper

On occasion, when the mood takes him as it so often does, he will put down his papers, get up from his kindly old chair, and leave for a while the sweeping beam to sow its charitable seed — that seed which, when falling on the ground of a helmsman’s fertile consciousness, ought germinate in it a cautious vigilance. He descends then, the long corkscrew of the stairs and opens at their base the metal door so that he may take a closer look at what might be beyond his tower’s environs. There he always finds the churning world, she laps at him from every side with no respite, and spatters him with spray. Thanks to a certain modulation, a tone which he adopted long ago when he still wore shorts and buckled shoes, there is no danger here from neither shark nor crocodile, not in this sea stuffed as it is like a dressing-up box with whimsy. Indeed, were there such creatures hidden neath the sliver-thin surface of the waves, they’d have no teeth but only soft gray gums and goofy grins, and they’d be giggling knowingly at the whole thing. And so it is that as he gazes out, he cannot help but wonder what it is he might be warning of with the light that turns atop his tower, because that tower is itself in fact the only hazard anywhere on which a ship might rip her wooden skin and haemorrhage her lumpy blood that’s made of all the gasping sailormen.