Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in broken shells, each entry worn to a syllable the waves can carry without strain.

I found your name in the wrack line once, spelled out in bladderwrack and razor clam, already drying into something the wind would take by noon.

There is a grammar to what the sea returns: the lighter things arrive together, corks and feathers and the foam that means a storm has finished speaking. The heavier things come alone.

I have learned to read the salt diary the way one reads a face across a room, catching the drift before the meaning, the brightness before the word.

Tomorrow the page will be rinsed again, and the shore will hold nothing but the sound of its own revising, that long hush between one wave and whatever the next one brings.