Salt Ledger

The tide keeps its accounts in limestone, each wave a stroke drawn back before the ink has dried.

What the cliff surrenders the current files away— a tooth of quartz, a fistful of rust-colored sand that was somebody's wall.

I have watched the water rehearse its one argument against the headland's silence, patient as a language spoken only in fractures.

Somewhere below the foam line the ledger balances: loss entered twice, once as absence, once as the smoothness of glass.