Salt Liturgy

The tide pulls its white vestments back across the flats, revealing what the water kept in confidence— ribbed sand, a colony of mussels opening like small dark hymnals.

I have stood here before, in a coat that no longer fits, watching the same herons stitch their patience into the shallows, their legs thin as arguments for staying.

There is a grammar to erosion, each wave a sentence the cliff has already agreed to forget. The sea does not mourn what it takes. It simply takes, and turns it into glass.

My mother kept a jar of beach stones on the kitchen sill. Dry, they were nothing— gray, unreadable. But held under the tap each one remembered its life in the current, its bright unbroken hour.

Tonight the fog will find the harbor and the bell buoy will speak to no one in particular, its low bronze vowel carrying over water that holds every color of leaving.