Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its long syllable across the flats, and I am standing where the herons stood an hour ago, their patience still pressed into the mud.

There is a line the water draws that no cartographer records — a border between what the sea remembers and what it agrees to return.

I have carried stones in my pockets from every shore that let me leave. They click together like the teeth of a language I almost speak, consonants worn to vowels by the waves.

Evening lowers its blue net. The salt wind stitches shut the distance between here and there, and I find I cannot tell which side of the meridian I stand on.

Somewhere a bell is ringing over water, over nothing, its sound a door that opens only from the inside.