Salt Margins

The tide pulls its white hem back across the flats, leaving behind a cursive no one taught it— wrack lines, shell fragments, the small economies of salt.

I have watched this all morning, the way the sea rehearses its one argument with the land, each wave a revision that changes nothing and everything.

There are cliffs here that remember centuries of this conversation, their faces carved into expressions of slow astonishment, sandstone cheeks hollowed by wind.

A cormorant dries its wings on a rock the ocean is forgetting— each year a little less of it rises above the waterline, each year the bird finds a smaller stage.

What we call permanence is only erosion's patience, the stone still learning how to become the sand it was before it was stone.