Inventory of a Lighthouse Keeper

One oilcan, dented at the lip, a logbook the salt has chewed open, three matches kept dry in a tin that once held my mother's thimbles.

The wick eats the dark like a slow animal. I count the breaths between flashes and find them shorter than last winter, or perhaps I am the one shortening, folding myself into the lamp's slow weather.

A gull stalled in the updraft above the rocks— for one held heartbeat, neither of us moved. I have been here long enough to mistake its hunger for a kind of company.

At night the radio coughs up Lisbon, sometimes Cork, sometimes only the hiss between countries. I answer in the language of the beam: a sweep, a pause, a sweep, a pause, the only sentence I have ever finished.

Tomorrow I will polish the brass again until I can see the boy I was standing on the other side of the glass, asking if the sea has yet returned what I sent out, all those years ago, by light.