The Big Lights

It's something the philosophers might ponder,
the way that big W swept the ocean at night
between 1974 and 1976
from the roof of the Sea Spray Motor Inn;

The lights were designed
to bring in tourists driving south from Montreal
(Ici en parle Francais)
but what came instead was fish,

Whole galleries of herring, drinking in the voltage
200 yards offshore and loving it,
thousands of shivers they were, and no one
knew about them until a Woods Hole oceanographer
got lucky, stumbled into them in a wetsuit;

He was alone that night, swimming beyond the
   breakwaters
and his own suspended disbelief,

Beyond Osiris and the holy rollers, the breakers
   phosphorescent
in the foam, and two black years later,
when the eight-story Sea Spray was destroyed
and the lights went out forever,

No one ever told the herring,
who still wait out there like Giants fans, season
after season, still believing Heathcliff
will find Cathy in the moors, that Mr. Milligan
(who now lives in the Canary Islands)

Will finally take his too-long sideburns
behind the hot water heater and throw
that great power switch,

Lighting everything clear to the Grand Banks this time,
and eight years from now they'll still be out there,
passing the legend down by word of mouth,
still hung up on that magnificent absence,

The sentimental little appetizers quite unseen
by Canadian tourists and year-round residents,
who at last report
were fast asleep in their Hudson's Bay blankets,
snoring beneath their horoscopes.