Salt Geometry

The tide pulls back its white sheet and the beach is all confession — ribbed sand, the cursive tracks of plovers, a jellyfish dissolving into light.

I have stood here before, cataloguing what the water discards: a razor clam hinging on nothing, kelp ropes still smelling of the deep arithmetic.

Everything the ocean teaches it teaches through subtraction. The cliff face loses a century each winter, and the salt finds every wound it was never asked to heal.

Tonight the moon will lay its single road across the strait, and someone will believe they could walk it — that bright, that almost solid.

But morning comes with ordinary fog, the harbor bell swinging its one dull note, and the sea rephrasing its question as though we had not already failed to answer.