Inventory of a Lighthouse Keeper

Seven brass keys, each warmed by a different pocket. A logbook where the storms forget their names. The kettle, mineral-pale, holds the taste of every winter I have boiled down to tea.

Outside, the gulls rehearse their argument with weather. A trawler stitches the horizon, unstitches it. I count the lamp's revolutions like a rosary of held breath, of held breath, of held breath.

My wife's letters arrive folded into birds. I unfold them slowly so as not to break the wings. She writes of bread, of the dog's new gray, of a hyacinth that opened on the kitchen sill — each ordinary thing a coastline I no longer reach.

At dusk I climb the iron stairs and trust the light to do what I cannot: to lay a road across the dark for the lost, for the late, for the boats that have forgotten their own names. I am the small bright animal that lives inside the warning.

When the bulb sings, I sing back. Some nights the sea answers in a voice that sounds almost like my mother's, asking, again, when I am coming home.