Beacons

this is your room / in Calle Visión // if you took the turn-off / it was for you adrienne rich, “Calle Visión”

In pieces, in glimmers—

Trust him, take his hand.

A beacon shines through a cypress. Then our night is dark; the shoreline road is empty of cars.

Trust him, the beacon returns: each cypress branch curves like the tine of a wishbone. He and I clamber over rocks to the foot of the metal lighthouse with a concrete base; a distant foghorn sounds, and he begins to dematerialize beside me, as if he’s being beamed off this world, until he is gone, obliterated from life. I can no longer picture his face. I call out his name. I see in the dimly lit archway of the lighthouse’s door a soft, mustached man in blue scrubs. He beckons to me, and then turns to the other men standing, crouching, kneeling inside. I panic, walk hurriedly on through the dunes, to the calm ocean. In the shallows a tawny nurse shark thrashes. A boy, wading beside it, glancing at my mouth but averting my gaze, teases it with a dead mackerel over its snout, and it lunges. Foghorn blares. Sea-water warmer than it should be. Shark tears fish away from hand.

For two weeks—as I walk to the convenience store, do the dishes, or text on my smartphone—this imagistic storyline comes in pieces, in guttering flashes, bursts. And it’s not solely visual. The retreat of the man cruising me, the pulsar of the lighthouse, the pendulum of the mackerel: as I feel “translations” of those movements—the pulling away, the spinning, the rocking—deep in my sinuses, in my midsection and legs, as I emotionally feel contours of excitement, love, sadness, and dread, the very intimate etymological kinship of “motion” and “emotion” becomes apparent. Though I don’t smell or taste anything, sometimes I can hear the murmuring babble of the men just inside the lighthouse, the splashing of the shark’s caudal fin. On my neighborhood walks, I can’t pass a Monterey cypress without recognition’s static electricity running down the hairs of my back, up to the underwings of the shoulder blades, rippling up like live wires through the trapezius muscles to the base of skull, then spreading along the jawlines to the tender glands nesting there: a lump forms in the throat, tears fill the eyes. As when I picture my grandfather picking up the thick needles underneath his Norfolk Island pine. As when I imagine an alternate history: I’m at my senior prom in 1998 slow-dancing with a boy I love, and it’s no big deal. Not just a daydream or a mental slideshow, my waking dreamscape with the lighthouse is essentially the same vivid, persistent experience of many artists, not just some priestly artistic elite. I call such an experience a vision. It spurs us to action: we sit and write.

His hand in mine. A foghorn sounds. Around the shaft of the lighthouse, a rusty staircase: the helix of it—like an orange rind peeled off and extended as a single corkscrew—dissolves, drips away like mercury, and he is gone.

“Vision? Yeah, I’d never use that word,” a recovering Catholic friend of mine said when I brought up the topic. “It’s pretentious.” In the car was another talented poet, his first book having recently won a prestigious prize, who added, “I’d call it an idea, imagination.” I can understand why contemporary poets, especially my age and younger, hesitate to speak of visions. Tell your poetry workshop or your therapist or your mother that you’ve been having a vision and see how that pans out.

The vision I’ve described, though, isn’t a hallucination—I don’t mistake it for part of the tangible world. It’s neither a prophetic revelation like John’s red dragon devouring a baby nor an instance of transverberation, the angel continually impaling Teresa of Avila with a spear—“this I thought he thrust through my heart several times, and that it reached my very entrails...