The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts the things the wind has not yet taken: a brass key green with the breath of fog, the photograph curling toward its own white edge, a teacup ringed with the ghosts of mornings.

Below him, the water keeps its long argument with the rocks, polishing them down to vowels. He has learned the shape of every silence, the particular hush before the gulls remember their hunger, their flat astonished cries.

Some nights the lamp turns and turns and finds no ship, only the slow industry of stars stitching themselves into nothing. He thinks of his sister, her laugh like a window flung open in a room he can no longer enter.

By dawn the kettle whistles its small complaint. He writes the weather in a book no one will read, the ink blooming faintly where his sleeve has touched it, each letter a small lantern, lit and lit again.