The Crib

Up into the Sixties someone stayed out there
all year, keeping that light in the middle of the waves.
Just a lighthouse, it’s round big as the rock
it sat on, nothing else, out in the mindless
migration of whitecaps heading their numb anger
against the coast seven miles downwind.

Sometimes in mid-winter even the ore tankers
are chased off the lakes, and from the hills
a mile in off Good Harbor Bay you can hear
the water and wind at night as if a storm
has ripped a hole straight into space
and everything human is funneling straight up

into it. From the hills you can look out
and see the Crib light far offshore,
warning all of us who dare to think about it,
what it would be to be a man out there, on a rock
in the tearing white waves, tending a moment

of light in the black indifference of time.