The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

Every Tuesday I count what the tide returns: a child's blue sandal, a length of rope braided with kelp, the small bones of fish arranged like sentences I cannot read.

The lamp turns its slow attention over water the color of pewter, and I keep my own kind of light — a kettle, a candle, the radio murmuring news from the mainland.

My wife has been gone seven winters now. Her cup still hangs on its hook, the rim chipped where she set it down too hard the morning she forgot my name and remembered, instead, the song her mother sang.

Out there, a freighter draws its bright wound across the dark. I send my beam to meet it, nothing exchanged but the old promise: I see you. Keep going. The rocks are here, and so am I, and so is the morning.