The Cartography of Salt

The tide keeps its own ledger, depositing white rims on the rocks like the margins of letters never sent.

I have stood at this shore before, my shadow longer than the pier, watching the water rehearse its one argument with the land.

There is a grammar to erosion— how the cliff learns to concede, how the cave becomes an amphitheater where the sea performs for no one.

My grandmother pressed shells into my palm and called them the currency of patience. I spent them all on listening, on the particular silence between one wave and the next.

Now the salt maps my skin, tracing meridians I cannot read, and the ocean withdraws again carrying its atlas of elsewhere.