Salt Ledger

The tide keeps its accounts in stone, each wave a digit pressed into the soft arithmetic of cliffs.

What the sea owes, it pays in sand— grain by grain deposited on the bare counters of the shore, where plovers walk like auditors tallying what remains.

I have watched the headland lose its argument with winter, whole sentences of rock dissolved into the grey language of foam.

There is a ledger no one reads, written in the cursive of salt crystals on the underside of every pier— a record of what was solid once and learned to let go.