Salt Geometry

The cliff face remembers in layers— ochre, chalk, a seam of iron the color of dried blood, each stratum a sentence the ocean has been slowly unwriting.

Below, the tide pools hold their small provisional worlds: anemones closing like fists around the idea of food, hermit crabs hauling their spiral debt.

I press my thumb to the rock and it gives back a million years of rain, of salt, of pressure that turned loose sediment into something almost certain.

But the sea disagrees. It sends its arguments in waves, each one removing a syllable, and the cliff, faithful to its own slowness, answers by falling.