Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in broken shells and wrack-line cursive, each entry overwritten by the next.

I found a page once — green glass worn to the shape of a throat lozenge, still holding the light it swallowed off some other coast.

What the sea remembers it remembers with its whole body: the rocking, the long approach, the moment sand gives way beneath the wave's tongue.

We are not so different. I carry yesterday's weather in my shoulders, last year's argument in my jaw. The body is a coast that will not stop revising.

Tonight the water pulls back to show its work — stones, kelp, the rib of a boat no one claims. By morning it will all be taken. By morning it will all be given back.