Salt Theorem

The tide writes its one sentence over and over, dragging consonants of shell and gravel back into the throat of deeper water, and each revision is the final draft.

I stood where the pier stilts go soft with barnacles, tasting the air's metallic psalm, watching a cormorant fold itself into a black apostrophe and pierce the surface without apology.

There is a salt theorem I cannot prove: that everything the ocean takes it returns in an unrecognizable form — driftglass where there was a bottle, smooth bone where there was a jaw.

My grandmother kept sea-bleached dollars in a jar above the kitchen sink. She said they were the currency of patience, that the water had spent years minting each one to translucence.

Now I hold a stone the color of old milk, worn to the shape of a sleeping ear. I press it and hear nothing — only the long, slow argument of the world against itself.