Salt Margins

The tideline leaves its cursive on the rock, each letter thinner than the last, a sentence the sea begins but never finishes.

Barnacles hold their small white fists against the certainty of weather. What they grip is already dissolving.

I have stood here long enough to watch the fog erase the lighthouse, then return it, slightly shifted,

as though the coast were a draft the ocean keeps revising— striking whole paragraphs of cliff,

inserting silence where the gulls once pinned their cries to the fraying margin of the wind.