Salt Geometry

The tide keeps its appointments with the underside of stones, pressing its cold mouth against what the cliff has given up.

There is a grammar to erosion— how the softer layers go first, how a ledge becomes a lip becomes a whisper of itself, sand rephrasing what was granite.

I have watched the water work its patient subtraction, carving alcoves that hold nothing but the sound of their own hollowing.

Salt dries in fractal lace across the dark rock faces, each crystal remembering the exact shape of its leaving— a white geometry of loss.

And still the waves return, faithful as a question that does not need an answer, laying their brief cloth of foam on the altar of the ordinary.