The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts the things the sea returns: a button shaped like a small moon, the spine of a book swollen into a fist, one shoe, always the left, always walking back to no one.

The lamp above him turns the way a thought turns in the dark, sweeping rooms he has not entered, finding nothing, then finding it again, and again, and again.

Salt has rewritten the windows. He reads them with his palms. Outside, the gulls argue with the wind about who was here first, and the wind, as always, wins.

At dusk he eats bread the color of fog, listens to the rocks rehearse their old quarrel, and writes a single sentence in the log: *Today the horizon was a closed door.* *Tomorrow I will try the handle.*