Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit, shelved in the ribs of hulls gone soft with barnacle and forgetting. Each wave turns a page of silt and the reading is always different.

I found a jar once, green glass worn to the texture of sleep, its message dissolved into the water that carried it — the way a name released from the tongue becomes weather.

There are books down there written in the cursive of eelgrass, chapters that sway with the current and never arrive at conclusion. The fish pass through them like thoughts.

What the ocean collects it does not keep. It gives back altered, mineral, strange — a shoe without its twin, a plank remembering the shape of a deck, salt in the wounds of every beautiful thing.