Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in driftwood and kelp, each entry erased before the next is written. I have watched it all summer from this porch— the patient repetition of a hand that cannot stop correcting itself.

My grandmother pressed wildflowers in dictionaries between words she never used: apricity, selcouth. The petals turned the color of old tea and left their shapes like small, surrendered ghosts on pages no one thought to read aloud.

There is a salt in everything that lasts. The wood of this railing has gone silver with it, the hinges of the gate sing one flat note, and my skin remembers every afternoon it offered itself, open-palmed, to wind.

I am learning what the tide already knows— that keeping is a kind of violence, that the truest record is the residue: ring-stain on the table, shell half-buried, the ache in a hand that has released its hold.