What the Tide Keeps

The tide returns nothing whole. What it carries back is fragment— a lip of shell, one word from a letter, the particular blue of someone's coat.

We learn to read the partial things. A child holds up a stone worn smooth by ten thousand turnings, as if it were the stone's biography.

I have kept my own collection: the afternoon light that angled through a screen door in September, how it laid its gold in strips across the floor and I stood in it, not knowing it was leaving.

The sea doesn't mourn what it scatters. It only keeps moving, dragging its long hem across the sand, writing the same sentence over and over until it means something else.