Inventory of a Lighthouse Keeper

He counts the things the storm could not take: one lamp, oiled and patient as a saint, the salt that has learned the grain of his hands, a chair turned always toward the window's gray verdict.

Out there the water keeps no ledger. It forgets each ship the moment it passes, the way a mouth forgets a name it never wanted, while he writes the weather down in a book no one will read.

Some nights the beam goes out like an arm swung in slow welcome to nobody, and the dark leans back, unimpressed, and the foghorn answers itself across the miles.

He has begun to mistake the rhythm of the light for a pulse, for company, for the breath of a house that breathes only because he winds it nightly— and is grateful, and is terrified, that it does.

In the morning the gulls audit the rocks. The sea returns what it owes: a plank, a bottle, the small green proof that distance has hands. He gathers it all and calls it the day's arrival.