The gallery is a wet crown. The rail is cold enough to argue with your palms. You keep your feet on the iron plates because the fog makes distance into a liar.

You chart in the log: time, wind, where each wink sits. When the fog thickens, the buoy-lamp crawls nearer like a cat. When a hole opens, it jumps back to its real address. One light is only a town window caught in the Fresnel; when someone downstairs turns that lamp off for a second (Tess, testing), that wink dies.

Another stays, doubled, stacked, a smear over a smear. Refraction. Cold air over colder water bending the beam. Peck’s clippings called it a phantom hull. The hull is a streetlamp in a costume.

Thunder rumbles far out, more a feeling than a sound. Or it is a boat. Or it is the horn’s echo arriving late to a party it was not invited to.

You could go in and read the weather like a person with instruments. You could stay in this wet crown and watch the fog pulse like a living thing that is not alive.

You number the winks like a person who has decided not to be haunted by homework. One, two, three. One dies with a window. Two crawls when the fog crawls. Three is stubborn and doubled, a plate stacked on a plate. Peck’s word looming sits in your mouth like a lozenge. Cold water, colder air, light taking a bent road. Ships in old newspapers “sailed in the sky.” They were lamps on a bent road. You still shiver, because bent roads are eerie even when they are physics.