Eggplant

Her skin is fog and ivory

rippled by indecision

the delicate wedding cake

frosting crinkled on her

puzzling brow,

hands thin and alabaster, her long

sugary fingers invade the

dark shiny smoothness

first pinching then stroking

holding it up to drink the

shadow with her radiant cheek

she feels the heat and

rubs her straight, thin nose

against the absolute

firmness of it,

and unabashedly, after

her caresses tenderly

lays it slowly

down.

prepositions

Butterfly on a bell

redbird on a cannon

child by the roadside

your face in the window

haiku

grass green,long and soft

white skin and dark hair uncoiled

the berries of her lips.

The next day, he limped down to the thin, pebble beach by the lighthouse dock where he kept the small boat tied to a post. He wore an old, muddy blanket draped over his shoulders. He was still naked and spattered with blood, both his own and of the men he had killed. The side of his face was raw and hurt terribly. He looked and saw that his boat had been taken, the rope cut in haste. He let out a groan of despair and began gingerly washing himself in the cold waves. He finally steeled himself to shamble out into the surf and plunge his matted hair into the sea. When he came up for air, he noticed the half-sunk boat bobbing in the waves just inside the breakers. He swam out to it and grabbed the small stub of the rope, laboriously pulling it to shore.

As soon as he got it close enough to walk it in, he sat down exhausted and began sliding his poor cold butt in the shallows. Finally, he tipped it over and water came pouring out. The scrapes on the inside of the little boat and the bloody waterlogged shirtsleeve stuck to the oar lock gave mute testimony to the events that took place that night. It was most undeniably the squid that had claimed the pirate and dragged him down in the dark ocean. The frigid sea took on an even more chilling aspect for the battered lighthouse keeper.

He repaired the boat and fashioned new oars for it and the days took on their grinding march once again. He fished and scraped the hard,rocky soil for his sustenance. Every night, he tended the great light, heedless of hardship and difficulty. Weeks passed before he spotted the cleverly hidden navy longboat among the rocky coves of the island while he was looking for clams. It was a large and heavy thing, so he left it where it was and spread the thick canvas of its sail over it as a cover.

He occasionally had nightmares as he lay down in his rough bed at dawn. He dreamt of that terrible night. He dreamt that it was he who was dragged down by the giant squid as he stabbed at the horrid tentacles with a broken chisel.

The ship finally came with his replacement, a young poet with fine clothes and a chest of books. The young man looked at him and tried to pry from him, some sign of good spirits or any deep insight. Although he was only a year or two older, the lighthouse keeper just looked at him like he was a babbling child.

He told the captain about the missing longboat and told them how to find it. It was, after all, the King's property. The sailors had heard about how the boat was taken by the fierce pirate/convicts from other crews who had been combing the seas for these murderous thugs who managed to kill the marines and officers who were on guard when they escaped.

The sailors also began to notice how sullen and rough their formerly bubbly charge had become. He submitted his closed report to the Captain, who scarcely read it at first, simply noting the missing provisions with little interest. It was when the events of that terrible,stormy night were recounted that the Captain stopped drinking his glass of port. It was a remarkable story made all the more singular by the clipped, matter-of-fact way in which it was written.

Silence followed the man on his voyage home. The sailors kept their distance, making note of the long knife in his belt. When he returned, he scarcely spoke, and when he did it was always direct and with a purpose. He saw the world and the people in it as ugly and possibly dangerous.

By all accounts in the village, he was much improved.

As they always say in these things, it was a dark and stormy night. The man worked diligently trying to keep the beam of the lighthouse as bright as possible. As he was heading downstairs after making adjustments to the lens, he heard a banging sound coming from one of the shutters. He simply assumed that it had come open from the wind, a thing which happened from time to time.

He ambled toward the noise, thinking of tools he might employ to keep this from happening again. He stopped by the little niche in the stairway where he kept his tools and put a hammer , some nails, and a chisel in a small canvas bag. As he reached the ground floor near the shutter, he noticed a rank, fetid odor and heard a half stifled bellow as one of the pirates hit him with a club right on the side of his head near his right eye. He fell with a sickening thud.

Much later in the night, in the dark , dark hours when all was still, he awoke. More precisely the cold drops of sluggish rain water coming through the open window brought him to his senses. He was in terrible pain. His right eye was shut with blood and the thin bones on the side of his face were crushed. He was naked, having been stripped by the convicts the canvas bag with the hammer had rolled into a corner when it fell from his stunned grip.

He could hear them cursing and arguing in the kitchen down the hall. They were angry at the sad condition of the provisions. Finally, the leader said "We'll have that dead bugger by the stairs". There awoke in the man a primal force, an anger so profound and strong that all the sunday school lessonss and nursery rhymes about forgiveness and kindness could not hold it back. He burst into the room, with his hammer in one hand and his chisel in the other. He let out a horrible scream as he crushed in the skull of the nearest intruder with his hammer. He stabbed the second one as the pirate tried to lift himself out of a chair. Blood spattered in huge stripes and the chisel broke off its handle lodging itself in the mans chest. One pirate had managed to pull a knife out of his belt, but it did him no good. He was felled by the thrown hammer. The last pirate fled into the night where he clawed his way into the small lighthouse boat and blindly rowed out into the dark sea as far away from the light as he could.

The man heard a shuffling noise as the wounded pirate was getting up with his knife. He turned and jumped on him. The pirate's will to live was strong and his feet drummed hard on the floor as he was held down and strangled. The pirates knife hand was firmly pressed against the floor with one grimy knee. Blood from the lighthouse keeper's red, raw eye socket spattered on the pirates face as was slowly choked to death.

Thus, he met the horrible giant squid. From that point on, he was always fearful of being pulled down into the dark depths and ripped to shreds by this brutal creature. The squid had sharp, hooked claws embedded in the suckers of its mighty tentacles. The thought of having his skin shredded as he was pulled down into the abyss kept him away from the sea for a few days, but starvation began to make him seek fish in the shallow cove on the island. There was a blue-black ribbon of deep water, a bottomless ravine that marked the beginning of the monster's territory. He avoided it, with a shudder and sometimes envisioned it in his nightmares.

The most horrible trial did not come from beneath the waves though. It came one dark night in the form of four escaped convicts. They had been pirates, vile and murderous men, who had been captured and were on their way to the home country to be hanged. They had killed several of their captors and stole the longboat from the navy frigate, making their way to the lonely island for provisions and water.

There is a sense of humor in the clockwork of the universe. Once, long ago, there was a man who could not shut up. He was a nice enough man. When he was a boy, his Mother told him that if he had nothing nice to say, he should say nothing at all. He had a lot of nice things to say. He was very positive. Even though, as you can well imagine, everyone hated him soon after being exposed to his constant flourishing of uplifting statements and unwanted flattery. His relatives had no idea what they should do. There were no mental hospitals in the country. There was only a crowded mental asylum where madmen were whipped, dowsed, scorched, and bound. They wanted none of that for him. If they put him in a monestary, he would get sent back for breaking the vow of silence. In the navy, the penalty for talking out of turn was being flogged. In the army, well, it was probably a little worse. They were at a loss for what to do with the man. It wasn't until one day, when his Uncle's gameskeepers Cousin's son mentioned that the Lonely Island Lighthouse needed a keeper urgently. This seemed like a perfect opportunity. The Uncle was sure that when he explained the dire need for a handy, dedicated, man to make sure ships didn't run aground on this deadly rock thrust up from the bottom of the briny deep, the man would agree...and he did.

Soon, they had him bundled into a navy schooner with all the comforts he could take with him for an extended stay. There was a crowd of well wishers, the Postman who was often delayed by the good natured chatter, the shopkeeper who would sometimes lose his train of thought when the man would come in and compliment him on his window displays, the school master who was no fan of idle chatter and clamped down on it whenever it came across his path, the baker's wife, who was unflinchingly ignorant and harbored smouldering resentment for the man ever since he called her pastry whorls "epicurean attainments worthy of Olympian presentation", the list goes on and on.

The sailors were glad to be rid of him when the rowed him ashore to the sparse dock on the lighthouse landing. The trip had taken two weeks. After the first day of being complimented on their seamanship and being lauded for their ability to imbibe huge pewter mugs of grog without falling from the rigging, the sailors were in a froth to have the cat of nine tails taken from its red bag and used on this lubber until he "shut his damned gob". Unfortunately, he was a civilian and they couldn't "let the cat out of the bag" on his account.

They dropped him off with the wind howling and the drizzle on his brow. He was all alone. He trudged up the stony hillside with all his worldly possesions and tended the great lamp of the lighthouse the whole night through. It was on the second day he found out that his provisions were mostly inedible. The kegs containing flour were filled with weevils and sawdust. The freshwater casks were empty. The sugar jars were crammed with beach sand. There was only a crate or two of hardtack and some pickles. It was obvious someone had stolen his supplies and replaced them with trash or not at all. He found himself suddenly transformed into a gardener, fisherman, and inventor. He searched the rocky island for patches of soil and carefully tended and transplanted the remnants of some much prior resident's garden. He fished daily and he was forced into devising methods of collecting rainwater and setting up a still that turned seawater into fresh water.

through all this privation and struggle, he tended his lamp faithfully every night. The first tragedy that befell him was that he lost two fingers to a giant squid while he was fishing. He felt a tug and then a jerk and then a massive pull on the line. Foolishly, he wrapped the line around his hand and pulled with all his might. The boat heeled over and he found himself looking into an eye the size of a dinner plate. Screaming, he flung a fending pole into the beast's eye which only served to enrage it. Seconds later, he felt a sickening pain in his hand and looked down to see his pinky and ring finger on the floor of the boat.