Salt Marsh at Low Tide

The water pulls back like a slow confession, baring the ribcage of the marsh— dark channels veining through cordgrass where fiddler crabs semaphore their one enormous question.

Mud gleams with the privacy of a wound still fresh enough to hold the light. A heron stands in it, unhurried, its patience older than the estuary, its eye a black nail driven into gold.

Everything the tide owned it has surrendered: broken mussel shells, a frayed rope, the whelk's abandoned architecture. What remains is honest in its ruin, the way a coast is honest after storms.

I have come here to practice the discipline of low water— to see what is left when the shining draws back, when the fullness no longer hides the ordinary bones.

The sun drops a degree. The channels begin their slow refilling, and the marsh exhales a smell of iron and creation, as if the earth were remembering how to bleed.