A lighthouse stands. A lighthouse stands sentry some four miles off Ireland’s southernmost coast. This lighthouse is named the Fastnet after the rock on which it was built. The Fastnet stands sentry constructed of cast iron and brick. The Fastnet is now de-peopled. That is, since 1989 its operations have been mechanized. Its operations have been made automatic by computers, the people removed. Its great beam sweeps–wards and warns-off–all without the warmth of human bodies. Without body heat, a cold and desolate slab of shale jutting from an indifferent sea becomes more solitary, more gray, more soulless. More or less without a soul, the Fastnet speaks. More accurately, the Fastnet tweets. It tweets data on wind direction, wind speed, gust direction and gust speed. I confess, I do not know the difference between wind and gust. I confess, I pretend to know the difference between direction and speed. I profess, I have never asked the Fastnet, as such. The ghost of the de-peopled machine, the ghost who lives on the rock, tweets out the weather. As far as I can say, I am the lone soul who interacts with those tweets. I, the lone soul who listens. The only one who weathers. I am its Keeper. Each “Like” makes sea spray explode up from the screen of my mind’s eye. The mind’s eye that sweeps over the vast indifferent sea of tweets (not about wind speed or wind gust, not about direction). I am the single lonely heart applied to the Fastnet. I beat beneath each cry of direction, each cry of speed. I reply when it shines a light out amidst the darkness, bearing news of the wind. I answer that beaming call with a heart, a “Like,” a sign–to ward, to welcome in every sea-battered vessel, claim each isolated light.
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Adrian Dallas Frandle is a queer fish and reader of shorelines. “Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth” out now with Kith Books (2023). Recently, their work has appeared in Poet Lore, Honey Literary, Hooligan Magazine, & The Connecticut Literary Anthology. Adrian holds an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College. Read more at adriandallas.com