Salt Margins

The tide withdraws its argument and leaves behind a rind of foam, each bubble catching the last hour before it thins to nothing.

I have watched the cliff face lose a century of sandstone in a night, the way a sentence loses meaning when repeated past its use — syllables crumbling into vowels, then air.

There is a line the water draws and redraws, never in the same place, patient as a cartographer mapping a country that does not want to hold its shape.

Somewhere beneath the kelp and grit a smoother stone is forming, ground from what the headland was before the storms found its soft seams. I pick it up. It fits my palm

the way certain losses do — so worn they almost feel like something you were given.