The Lighthouse Keeper's Inventory

Each night he counts what the water gives back: a gull's wing folded like a closed letter, the green glass of a bottle worn to fog, one shoe, always one, never its other.

He keeps no ledger but the turning lamp, its slow hand sweeping the dark for hours, writing the same white sentence on the waves and erasing it before the meaning sets.

The radio speaks in another room. He lets the voices fill the empty cups, pretends the static is a kind of weather moving through somewhere he has never been.

Morning arrives the way forgiveness does— gradual, then all at once, then gone. He climbs down to the rocks where the tide has left its bright debris, and begins again to choose

what to carry up, what to leave for the sea to reconsider. The horizon holds its single line, that promise without speech: the world is wide, and you are small, and welcome.