The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

Forty years of salt have eaten the brass, left the lens cloudy as a cataract. I polish what the storms forgot to take.

The logbook lists arrivals: a gull with a fishhook through its tongue, a bottle of someone's small confession, the moon, every night, on time.

I count what stays — the kettle's whistle, the cot's complaint, the foghorn practicing its single grieving vowel. Below, the ocean keeps its own ledger, inscrutable, in foam.

Ships I've waved at have grown old elsewhere. Their captains are grandfathers now, or names on stones I will never visit. Still I climb the iron stairs at dusk, still I light the wick.

The light is not for them anymore. It is the shape my loneliness takes when it remembers it has work to do — a slow turning, a beam laid down across the dark like a hand on a shoulder.