THE SAND HILL REVIEW         http://www.sandhillreview.org       2001 May

 

Lighthouse

 

     We’re not just squeaky door-hinges: we are all lighthouse towers slightly off plumb, like the one south of San Francisco built after the Gold Rush and Civil War, whose keepers had to lug fuel canisters of pig lard up 144 steps to the center of a sixteen-foot-high lens composed of over  a thousand individual prisms which focused the glow into twenty-four spider legs of light so that someone adrift¾even below the horizon¾could see them and be saved.

 

Joel Katz