Salt Covenant

The tide returns what it was never given— a copper button, a tongue of kelp, the rum-dark wood of something that once held a name.

I kneel where the foam hisses back into its own dissolving. My hands close on wet sand and the sand says: again.

There is a covenant older than language, written in salt on the lips of the living— that we will stand at the edge of what leaves us and call it beautiful, that we will swallow the horizon each evening and wake with our mouths full of light.

The gulls wheel their one white question above the breakwater. I have no answer but my body, this blunt instrument of staying.

Somewhere a bell tilts in the fog, ringing for no one, ringing for everyone who ever pressed an ear to absence and heard the ocean answer.