Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its rough tongue across the shingle, tasting what the cliffs have let go of — feldspar, quartz, the slow confession of a headland.

I stood where the meridian cuts the beach in half, one foot in yesterday's water, one in tomorrow's, and the line between them: salt.

A cormorant opens its wings like a book left in the rain, drying each page to the wind. It holds that pose so long it becomes the word for patience.

Somewhere under the sand a freshwater spring pushes up through the weight of the whole Atlantic, sweet and blind and certain.

This is what I wanted to tell you — that even the sea has seams, places where one current hands its cargo to another and the color changes, almost.