Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit, shelves of kelp and crushed quartz filing themselves by surge and season, each volume dissolved before it dries.

I found a wing bone on the strand, hollow as a flute, scoured white, and held it to my ear the way my grandmother held seashells, listening for the opus of salt.

What the ocean remembers it remembers in texture — the drag of sand across a crab's articulated back, the weight of fog pressing down on waves until they forget to crest.

There is a grammar to disappearance: first the footprint, then the name, then the fact that something stood here casting a shadow shaped like a door.

I set the bone back among the wrack. The tide exhaled and took it in, another page returned to the collection that reads itself in the dark, in the brine, in the constant turning.