Salt Library

On the low beach the tide writes in erased ink, pearl-bruise foam, a hush of salt and iron. Each wave shelves a book of water, pages blistered with light, then gone.

Inland, the wind turns pages of dry grass, stitching the field to a borrowed sky. A gull’s cry hangs like a bracket around the sentence of distance.

I walk with pockets full of small stones, each one a closed fist of the earth. They warm against my palm, their silence a language I can almost read.

Evening files the horizon to a thin blade, and the sea, patient librarian, sorts its shadows. I leave my footprints where the tide can find them, a brief catalog of being, returned.