Salt Curriculum

The tide keeps no record of what it takes— a sandal, a name drawn with a stick, the painstaking cathedral of a child's afternoon. It only knows the pulling back, the long exhale across the flats.

I learned this watching herons stand in water to their knees, patient as old doctors, reading the salt curriculum of marshgrass for some lesson I kept failing.

There is a language spoken only at the moment water meets the rock— not the crash, but the half-second after, when the spray hangs suspended and the stone remembers it was sand.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on her kitchen sill, each piece a sentence worn to pure vowel. She said the ocean doesn't break things, it just talks to them long enough.

Tonight the moon tugs at something I can't name, some inland tide that rises in the chest and falls before I find the words— the old forgetting, the old return.