Salt Cartography

The tide withdraws its white indictment, leaving behind a cursive no one asked for — salt lines on basalt, illegible as the notes my grandmother kept in the margins of hymnals.

I have walked this shore in every weather. The kelp rearranges itself like sentences that almost mean something, and the driftwood holds its grey composure against the interrogation of waves.

There was a house here once. The pilings remain, barnacled and plumb, standing in water the colour of weak tea. Someone's kitchen window faced this exact crumbling of horizon into cloud.

Now the sandpipers conduct their frantic, stitching work along the foam, mending what the ocean opens. I watch them the way I watch clocks — aware that the motion means loss.

What the salt maps is not the land but the leaving. Each crystal a coordinate for what was fluid and is now still, glinting, almost too small to read.