Salt Meridian

The tide draws its slow blade across the flats, erasing what the morning left — shell fragments, rope scrawl, the pressed oval of a body's rest.

I have stood at this meridian where salt becomes air, where the horizon folds into a single gray nerve carrying sensation both ways.

There is a language the water speaks only to the underside of boats — a knock and hush, a knock and hush, like someone testing the walls of a house they once owned.

Somewhere behind me the dunes hold their grasses tight against the pull of elsewhere. I do not turn around. The sea is enough company tonight.