Salt Cartography

The tide draws its white finger across the mudflat, erasing what the morning made.

You watched a heron stand for so long it became a question the water asked itself.

There are maps that only exist when the sea pulls back— channels etched by older currents, the grammar of what moves beneath.

I have been charting you this way: by absence, by the shapes you leave pressed into the soft parts of a day.

The heron lifts. The flat fills again, salt into salt. Whatever was written becomes the thing that wrote it.