Estuary

Here where the river loses its name the water thickens, neither fresh nor salt, and cordgrass bends in one direction like an audience listening. A heron lifts from the mudflat, unhurried, as if time pooled here the way silt does — in slow accumulation, in patient deltas of almost-landing. The channel braids and unbraids itself. What was current becomes stillness, what was stillness becomes the pull of something lunar and indifferent. Fiddler crabs raise their single oversized claw to no one. The mud holds every footprint longer than it should, then lets go all at once, like forgetting. At dusk the water turns the color of old tea, of tannin, of every leaf that fell upstream and traveled here to dissolve into this in-between — this place that is only passage.