What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not ask permission. It arrives with its cargo of kelp and cold, undoing the sandcastle hour by hour until the moat becomes the sea again.

A child stood here once with a red bucket, certain she was building something permanent. The sand held the impression of her knees for exactly as long as it needed to.

Somewhere offshore, a buoy rings its small, indifferent bell. The cormorants have learned to use it as a place to dry their wings— not what it was made for, but enough.

What the salt remembers is not the ships. It is the wood that gave itself over, the slow unmaking that looks, from a distance, like the sea simply being the sea.