Salt Margin

The tide pulls back its grey silk and the rocks appear like knuckles clenched against the century, each one wearing a collar of barnacles that click shut when the air finds them.

I walked here once with someone whose name the salt has taken. We pressed our thumbs into the wet sand and watched the impressions fill with water so clear it looked like nothing.

Now the cliffs lean a little further toward the question the sea keeps asking. Sandstone crumbles in soft phrases, ochre dust on the tongue of the wind, and the gulls carry it inland without knowing.

There is a margin where the water darkens, where the floor drops away and the light changes its mind. I stand at its edge the way a word stands at the edge of meaning—

half salt, half air, still holding the shape of what it was asked to carry.