Inventory of a Disused Lighthouse

The lamp has forgotten the verb of itself, its great glass eye gone milky with salt. Spiders rope the stairwell in patient geometry, spinning the dark into something they can hold.

Below, the keeper's chair still faces the window as if waiting for a ship to disagree with the horizon. A teacup wears its last brown ring like a wedding band. The logbook's final page reads only: wind, then nothing.

Each night the waves rehearse their old approach, combing the rocks for a beam that no longer answers, and the tower stands, a stone throat with no cry, counting the gulls that mistake it for a friend.

What is a watchman once the watching ends? The walls keep their posture out of habit. Even abandoned, something here insists on rising— the way a held breath remembers it was air.