What the Tide Leaves

The sea returns what it cannot keep: a shoe without its pair, a rusted hinge, the name of someone who forgot the water.

We come here believing in retrieval, in the luck of glass worn soft as skin, but the beach is mostly subtraction.

My grandmother's hands folded napkins into birds that never flew — each crease a gesture toward the permanent, undone by morning, by the ordinary need to eat.

What the tide leaves is not a gift. It is the tide's indifference, made visible — stone admitting it was once much larger, the world confessing it has moved on without us.

Still we search the wrack line at low water, ankle-deep in cold, holding what we find to the light — as if the light were ours to borrow, as if we were not also, briefly, here.