What the Salt Knows

At low tide the flats go silver, each hollow filling with its own sky. The heron does not move. It is practicing being a reed.

My grandmother folded napkins into swans without looking at her hands, the way the sea folds and unfolds each wave into the one before it, nothing lost, just changed.

A child writes her name in the wet sand and the ocean erases it gently, not as punishment but the way you smooth a sheet before someone you love lies down.

Salt crystallizes on the rock's lip— white and exact, a kind of insistence. Even water, leaving, leaves a record. Even the tide keeps its receipts.