What the Tide Keeps

The sea does not remember the swimmer— only the shape her body carved through green water, then the closing of that shape.

I found her earring on the shore at dusk, a small gold comma punctuating nothing, the sentence already swallowed.

We say the tide goes out. We mean: it was here, and now the wet sand holds only the impressions of where we stood.

There is a kind of keeping that looks like loss— the way a shell holds the sound of the water it left behind.