Salt Curriculum

The tide keeps its own ledger, tallying what the shore surrenders— a crab's hollow gauntlet, the pale arithmetic of shells ground fine enough to pass for silence.

I was taught that salt preserves, but the sea pickles nothing whole. It takes the pier one plank at a time, leaves the pilings furred with green like columns of an older temple.

My grandmother kept jars of brine on a shelf above the stove, cucumbers suspended in their own slow dissolution, and she called it patience, not decay.

Now I stand where the breakers unscroll their white syllables and try to read what they erase— each wave a sentence the ocean will not finish.