The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts what the tide leaves him: a button of bone, a green bottle furred with salt, the small skull of something that once knew flight.

The lamp turns above him like a thought he cannot finish. Each night the same gull arrives at the railing, the same wind unspools its long sentence against the glass.

He keeps a ledger no one reads — the names of ships, the weights of weathers, the precise hour the fog opens its grey mouth and swallows the horizon whole.

Somewhere, his daughter is grown. Somewhere, a kettle is whistling in a kitchen he has not seen in nineteen winters. He writes: Tuesday. Calm. Three terns.

The light moves on without him, patient as a wound. He sleeps with the window open, listening for the one wave that knows his name and is still, even now, learning how to say it.