Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own calendar, each wave a page turned back to the first morning anything breathed.

I found a stone with a hole worn through it— the ocean's way of saying some doors take a thousand years to open.

My grandmother pressed wildflowers between the chapters of her Bible. The sea presses entire coastlines into something it can carry.

At dusk the water holds the sky the way a student holds a difficult sentence, trying to understand it all at once before the meaning scatters.

I leave my footprints at the edge. The salt diary accepts them, then writes over everything in its long, unbroken hand.