I found this poem while I was in graduate school in Toronto in the 90s, in one of the New Yorkers lying around the PIMS Common Room from their subscription. I have returned to it over and over again since that time (sigh), and I am putting it on my blog so I can find it more easily, darn it.
“My Soul is a Light Housekeeper”
(Error in the printing of the line “My soul is a lighthouse keeper,”
by an unknown female poet.)
Bored with the high drama of watching,
I see myself bound always to your absence,
sending out my pure circle of light so you
will know where I am, and how close
you might come to disaster. Imagine, love,
the tedium of this watch. On almost every day
nothing happens. And isn’t it wrong to yearn
for a great storm just to feel important?
I’ll let you go, then. Why shouldn’t my house
be my own, and my soul its keeper?
This work I needn’t take so seriously
since I’ve learned what pleases me, the light
of late afternoon through that window,
the intricate cobwebs I won’t disturb.
I know you don’t want to think of me
not always thinking of you, brave and imperilled.
I’m sure you’ll write to say: How can you change
so completely? You’re not the woman
I thought I knew. And I’m not,
but understand, dear, it wasn’t such a great change.
Imagine you could have seen that side of me
at the beginning, when we walked
for hours along the shore, and you were so certain
I was yours just because you loved me.
—Lawrence Raab, from The Probable World (Penguin Books, 2000)
Actually, I think *I* pointed you to it in that PIMS common room New Yorker…
That is very likely true. But I tend to make my default assumption that my real-life friends don’t necessarily want to be characters in my rather public blog, so I do blur some attributions.
I wrote some of the words down more than 20 years ago. I have searched for this poem for years…Finally found it..Thank you so much!!!!
I actually found this poem in the same New Yorker in a discard pile at our library back in high school. Thanks for putting it up! This poem’s stayed with me a long time, too.
I was in college in the 90’s when I tore this page from my aunt’s New Yorker, and of the millions of things I’ve ripped from magazines over the years, this beautiful poem is one of the very few that I still have in my possession. Rather than dig through my filing cabinet today when, out of the blue, I felt like revisiting the lines, I googled it and was delighted to find your blog. Thanks for posting it for yourself and for the rest of us with whom it continues to resonate.
(Very belatedly) I am so glad you found it here!