The Patience of Salt

The ocean does not argue with the cliff. It arrives, and arrives, and arrives again, each wave a sentence spoken without breath. Under the overhang where limestone drips its slow calligraphy, the tide pool holds a cosmos in a palm—anemones like small, pulsing questions no one asks aloud. What the salt wants is not destruction. It wants to know the stone completely, to trace each vein of quartz, each sealed fossil, the way a reader's thumb wears down a page returned to, night after night, for years. A thousand years from now the arch will open wide enough for a boat to pass through, and the sea will not call it victory. It will simply keep speaking in that low, unbroken voice it has mistaken, all this time, for silence.