Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its white hem back across the flats, leaving a script of kelp and broken shell that no one asked to read.

I stood where the salt meridian crosses the hour of low water, my ankles threaded with foam, and felt the planet turning beneath its thin veneer of sea.

There was a house once, built on stilts above the marsh grass. Its windows held the gray of every storm and let them go again at dawn, cleaned down to bare light.

Now the pilings lean like vowels in a half-remembered language. Mussels stitch the wood to something slower than decay, something almost like belonging.

The tide returns without convictions, filling every depression it abandoned, and I walk back along the wrack line carrying nothing but the sound of water rearranging stone.