What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not return the same water twice, yet the shore keeps the shape of every wave like a body keeps the shape of what it loved— a hollow in the mattress, a groove in the stairs.

Salt crusts on the lip of the estuary where the river forgets itself into the sea. Something is always dissolving here, something is always being named for what it is not.

A child once pressed her ear against the hull and heard the engine's deep continuous grief, the sound that passes through steel the way grief does— not stopped, only changed in frequency.

Now the harbor is quiet. Gulls quarter the fog. The boats knock softly against their moorings like old arguments that have lost their edge, still present, still turning in the current.

I have watched things I held become the weather, scatter into the ordinary sky. What the salt remembers, it writes on everything— hull, rope, the backs of hands, the open eye.