Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts— each wave a sentence started and swallowed back before the period.

I found a jar of sea glass on the shelf, green and amber, worn to the shape of something almost understood, the way a word in a dead language still hums against the teeth.

My grandmother pressed flowers between the pages of atlases, countries that no longer exist holding the roses flat and still. I think the sea does something similar with stones.

There is a hour before sunrise when the water has no color, when the horizon is a rumor passed between the dark and the almost-light, and everything you lost is nearly visible.

I have stopped asking the waves to bring things back. They have their own work— this patient, luminous erasing.