Salt Library

The tide withdraws and leaves its archive: a cursive line of wrack and bladderwort, each volume pressed flat by the weight of what has already moved on.

I kneel to read the margins— a crab's punctuation, the serif of a razor clam half-buried in its own dissolving page.

Nothing here was written to be kept. The salt has seen to that, working its slow erasure through every fiber of the text.

Yet each recession writes again, faithful to no original, the sentences arriving different and luminous and brief.