The gallery glow is a circus that does not sell tickets.

Wet rail. Far lights stacked like plates. The Fresnel, behind you, catching and flinging. Fog thins in pulses, and each pulse rewrites distance. You feel followed because the air is a million tiny mirrors and your own lantern is in them.

A rumble far out: thunder, or a boat, or the cliff returning some other town’s noise. You do not chase it.

On the low rocks, a shape gathers—round, dark, too low for a keeper, too still for a wave.

The instruments in the cottage would still like a vote. The shape would like a name.

Your eyelashes collect droplets until you are wearing a bead curtain. The stacked lights slide apart, kiss, stack again. You think of two transparencies on a projector in a classroom, and then you think that this is better than a classroom because the test is the night. The shape on the rocks does not wave. People wave. Paint and seals have other jobs.