Salt Library

The tide keeps a collection of everything we dropped at the shore— buttons, syllables, the stems of roses pressed into wet sand like signatures no one will read.

Somewhere beneath the green confusion a shelf of barnacled glass holds the light at angles the sun has since forgotten, each bottle a small arrested year.

I have stood at that margin where the water decides what to keep. It chose the ordinary things: a wool thread, a coin rubbed smooth, the hum of a song I sang once and lost.

Nothing the sea remembers stays the shape it was given. Salt files every edge to cloud, and what returns to the wrack line arrives transformed, unnameable, clean.