The Archipelagos of Memory

The salt-crust maps a history of tides, where the headland surrenders its clay. Each wave is a sculptor with an infinite chisel, shaving the cliff into the shape of a ghost.

Beneath the grey weight of the morning, the gulls carry fragments of the shore, high into the updraft's cold hands. They drop them like forgotten words into the churning throat of the deep.

I remember the house that stood here once, its foundations now a scatter of teeth. The sea does not steal; it only reclaims what was always lent by the moon, returning the solid to the rhythmic dark.