The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts the things the fog has eaten: a fishing boat, the church bell's tongue, the small blue house his sister painted the summer she stopped writing letters.

The lamp turns its slow wheel above him, patient as a horse in a millyard, grinding the dark into something thinner, something birds might pass through unbroken.

He keeps a logbook for the visible and a second one for what insists on staying — the salt that finds the hinges, the gull that learned his whistle, the woman who is not coming back from Trondheim.

Some nights the beam catches its own reflection on the wet rocks and he understands the lighthouse is not for the ships at all but for whatever is left of him, flinching once a minute toward the shore.