What the Salt Remembers

The tide empties its pockets each morning, leaving behind what it no longer needs— a knuckle of driftwood, one blue shoe, the fossil script of a worm's passage pressed into hardening sand.

We walked here when you still knew my name. The water made no distinction between us. It gathered our shadows, tasted them, returned them slightly altered, the way grief returns things.

Now the sanderlings run the shoreline on their nervous, stitching legs, reading the foam for whatever is edible, whatever the sea releases without meaning to.

I think of all the water that has passed through every living thing and kept going— the molecule that crossed a mammoth's tongue, that rose once from a Roman bath, that is right now clouds above Kamchatka.

Nothing is lost, they say, meaning it just becomes unrecognizable. The salt remembers its first dissolving. The shore holds the shape of each wave for exactly as long as it can.