Long Point Light

Long Pont's apparitional this warm spring morning, the strand a blur of sandy light, and the square white of the lighthouse-separated from us by the bay's ultramarine as if it were nowhere we could ever go-gleams like a tower's ghost, hazing into the rinsed blue of March, our last outpost in the huge indetermination of sea. It seems cheerful enough, in the strengthening sunlight, fixed point accompanying our walk along the shore. Sometimes I think it's the where-we-will be, only not yet, like some visible outcropping of the afterlife. In the dark its deeper invitations emerge: green witness at night's end, flickering margin of horizon, marker of safety and limit. but limitless, the way it calls us, and where it seems to want us to come, And so I invite it into the poem, to speak, and the lighthouse says: Here is the world you asked for, gorgeous and opportune, here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide, and a glinting code: promise and warning. The morning's the size of heaven. What will you do with it?