Tidepool at Low Tide

The tide pulls back its hem and leaves these bright parentheses in the basalt — water held in the cupped palms of stone. Here, an anemone unfurls its tentacles like questions it has no intention of answering. A hermit crab stutters across the floor of its diminished world. Everything is economy: the limpet's single muscle, the barnacle's quick fist opening and closing on whatever the current brings. This is how to wait — not with patience but with hunger, mouth open to the diminishing, each creature fluent in the dialect of enough. Soon the sea will return and erase these small kingdoms, fold them back into the ordinary amplitude of waves. But now they are entire, and sufficient.