The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts the gulls each morning like a rosary, fingers slick with salt, the rail still warm from a sun that never fully arrives.

In the logbook: the names of ships that passed, the weight of fog measured in lost hours, a sketch of a whale's spine breaching dusk.

The lamp turns. The lamp turns. Wicks trimmed, brass polished to a private moon — he is the small god of one rotating star.

At night he writes letters to no one, folds them into the mouths of bottles, launches a fleet of paper white as flinching.

The tide returns them, soft and unread. He stacks them in the closet beside the kerosene, each envelope a tide he has already answered.