Salt Cartography

The tide pulls back like a name you stopped saying aloud— a slow erasure of foam, then sand, then the darker sand beneath.

I have mapped the shoreline three times now. Each map disagrees. What the water claimed on Tuesday the water returned on Friday, changed.

A gull traces the same arc it has always traced above a sea that is never the same sea twice.

You left in the way salt leaves a wound: first the sting, then the clean, then the faint mineral taste of something that once kept the flesh together.

Whatever the cartographers know of coasts— that they recede, that they accrete, that the land and the water are only arguing toward each other— I am learning here, at the waterline, in my bare feet.