The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

He counts the things the tide returns: a bottle green as bottle-glass, the femur of a gull bleached patient, one shoe still tied, as if a man had stepped clean out of his walking.

The lamp above him turns and turns, flinging its slow coin across the water. Ships he will never meet receive it, nod once into the dark, and pass. He has grown used to being a verb.

Some nights the radio coughs up voices in languages weather has invented, and he answers in the only tongue the cliffs accept — a kettle's whistle, the small applause of his own footsteps.

Morning arrives like an honest stranger, laying its hands across the table. He drinks his tea. He writes the date. He marks the shipping lanes still empty, the long shelf of the horizon dusted.

Somewhere a wife who is no longer his is teaching a child the names of birds. He hopes the gulls she points to are kinder than the one whose bone is in his pocket, warm now, almost a kind of company.