Salt Theater

The tide arranges its small bones along the shore, each wave a sentence the sea cannot finish, and the gulls carry off the punctuation in their terrible, unhurried beaks.

I have watched the salt flats harden into mirrors that hold nothing but sky, the way a theater goes dark between one act and the something after.

There were days we pressed our palms to the wet glass of the aquarium and the jellyfish drifted past us like lanterns released from a funeral we had not yet agreed to attend.

Now the water draws its maps on the underside of every dock, charting coastlines that exist only at certain hours, only in certain light, and I am learning to read them

the way you learn a dead language — not to speak it, but to stand in the ruin of its cathedral and understand what the silence was once shaped around.