Salt Aria

The tide withdraws its silk across the flats, exposing what the water held in trust— a lattice of shells, each one a small abandoned theatre.

I have stood here before in a different body, younger and less fluent in the grammar of leaving. The gulls wrote nothing I could read then.

Now the salt air enters me like a hymn sung in a language I almost know. It fills the hollows where certainty once kept its instruments.

A freighter moves along the horizon's seam, stitching sky to sea with diesel smoke. How slowly the enormous things agree to disappear.

I pocket a stone worn smooth by the patience of waves— not a souvenir, but a verb, the present tense of being turned and turned and kept.