Salt Liturgy

The tide drags its tongue across the shingle, tasting what the land has left behind — a bottle cap, a feather, the green husk of something that was almost fruit.

I have come here to forget a name but the waves keep saying it, folding the syllables into foam, wringing them out against the rocks like laundresses who love their work.

There is a church the gulls have built from updrafts and complaint, its nave the whole grey sky, its hymn a single note held past the point of breath.

I kneel in the wet sand and let the water take my hands. It gives them back lighter, stripped of their small allegiances, clean as driftwood, ready to begin.