Salt Margin

The tide has taken its cut again, a crescent bitten from the bluff where lupine held the year together.

Below, the rocks are slick with kelp and the small, insistent mouths of limpets press their questions into stone.

I have watched this coastline lose its arguments with water, each winter a concession, each spring a new geography the maps have not agreed to.

There is a name for what remains after the wave pulls back its hand: the salt margin, white and crystalline, a residue of contact, proof that something touched and moved on.

I stand where the path ends in a grammar of loose gravel, thinking how the body, too, erodes toward what it loves, gives its outline to the wind.