Inventory of a Lighthouse Keeper

I count the brass and the salt of it, the lamp that turns like a slow argument with the dark, throwing its one sentence over and over across the water.

Gulls leave no forwarding address. The fog comes in wearing my mother's gray coat and stands at the window until I almost speak, until the horn answers for me, low and certain.

There are forty-two stairs and I know each ache. The sea has been writing the same letter to the rocks for a thousand years, never sealed, the envelope torn open again at every tide.

Some nights a ship blinks back— a stranger learning my one word for safe— and I feel the whole coast lean toward that small yes, the way a candle leans into the hand that guards it.

When morning unscrews the bulb of the moon I sweep the glass clean of moths and weather, and wait, patient as a key in a lock nobody has come yet to turn.