A Lighthouse Keeper Considers her Solitude

When I was young, I searched my body
for the truth about me. Now, my body
begins to slide off the top of me,
to rise to the top of me and slide away
like congealed fat.

I crest and break
with no beam cast over me.
I am a medallion rubbed down
by constant touching.

Undressed, I resemble a woman carved into
the prow of a ship, roughly hewn,
featureless so as not to offend
the living or the dead
shouldered nightly into the sea.

It isn’t that the body lies, just that it moves
in its own cross-current away from the truth
the spirit tells.

And why must I represent myself?
The bodies of objects
are used and loved freely.
Doesn’t the oil lamp stutter?
Doesn’t the signal-light cataract
with soot when I shirk the climb?

The dog tongues sand
from his webbed feet, slavering
and stinking of mackerel.
I’ll go up to the wind.
I’ll stand in the caressing wind and see
if anyone comes.

ξ

A Lighthouse Keeper Considers Love                                                                                             

She came neither by
schooner nor skiff,
neither by sea nor  
brackish channel,
neither by south
nor east, nor west,
and if she came by
north, I saw nothing
of her arrival, standing
as I do with the ice
sheet at my back.
She said neither please
nor thank you,
had neither
suitcase nor hat.
When I gave her 
the choice
of spare bedrooms, 
she took neither 
yellow nor red.
She was neither tired
nor wakeful, spoke
neither kind words
nor cruel. When I set her
a place at my table,
she took neither chair
nor stool. She was neither
pale- nor dark-haired,
neither fat nor thin.
Evenings, I ran her a bath.
She neither got out
nor stayed in.
She could neither dive
to an oyster bed,
nor sail to town
for new oil, nor pull
hard on a fishing line,
nor tell humpback
from right whale.
She was neither
a wit nor a reader,
she could neither
weed nor sow.
When she sat
in the garden
while I pulled 
one potato
after another
from a rocky furrow,
she sang
neither fast
nor slow.

ξ

Gabriella Fee’s poetry appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, Washington Square Review, The Common, Sprung Formal, Levee Magazine, LETTERS, The American Literary Review (2019 Prize for Poetry), and elsewhere. Their co-translation of Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s “Dolore Minimo'' won the 2021 Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize, and is under contract with Saturnalia Books. Excerpts appear in The Journal of Italian Translation and The Offing, and are forthcoming in Copper Nickel and the anthology Italian Trans Geographies. Fee holds a BA from Wellesley College, and was recipient of the 2021 Elizabeth K. Moser Fund for Poetry Studies Fellowship from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where they are a graduate instructor and MFA candidate in poetry.