Salt Aria

The tide pulls its white hem back across the gravel lip of shore, leaving a tremor of foam, a cursive no one keeps.

Somewhere beneath the green swell a forest of kelp leans into current the way a congregation leans into song, all one body, all separate.

I have stood here before with different hands, younger knuckles, a coat that fit. The water was this same indifferent silver and the gulls wrote the same frayed circles above the breakwater's crumbling teeth.

What the salt takes it does not return but leaves instead a residue, a faint white script on stone that says: I was here, I was here, I was the whole ocean once.

Now the evening folds its vast cloth down. The last ferry light drags a seam across the darkening bay and the shore exhales, letting the water have what it came for.