Salt Curriculum

The tide keeps its own syllabi, scratching equations into sand that no one copies down in time.

By noon the plovers have erased whole chapters with their stitching feet, and the dunes shift their vowels eastward, pretending nothing was said.

I watched a wave carry a stone the color of aeli's tooth and set it on a shelf of foam that held for exactly one breath.

Everything the salt teaches it teaches once — the lesson dissolving before the student can raise a hand.

And still we come back to the shore with our empty notebooks, pressing our ears to shells as if the ocean owed us an answer.