Inventory of a Lighthouse Keeper

I count the things the light has touched tonight: one trawler dragging its small constellation home, the gull that mistook the lamp for morning, the long muscle of the swell, flexing under a moon worn thin as a coin.

The wick remembers more than I do. It has burned through the names of ships I waved at and never met, through winters that arrived like letters with no return address, through the slow erosion of my own footsteps on the stair.

Salt has its own language. It writes on every window, erases, writes again, patient as a child practicing a single word. I have learned to read the weather by the way the glass begins to weep before the storm.

There is a loneliness that is not absence but attention — the keeper's gift, to stand awake while the whole coast sleeps behind me, holding one bright thought against the dark so the dark can find its way around the rocks.

At dawn I climb down into the ordinary world, my eyes still ringed with brightness, and the sea, exhausted, lays its gray cloth flat, and I, who kept the burning, am the one thing the light forgot to mention.