Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit, shelves of kelp and broken nacre catalogued by current, indexed by the moon.

Each wave delivers a new translation— the same story told in froth, in the drag of pebbles down a slope, in the hush that follows.

I found a book there once, its pages were the underside of light pressed against the shallows, each sentence dissolving as I read.

The librarian is salt itself, patron and archivist, preserving nothing whole but keeping everything alive—

the way a tongue remembers the sea long after the swimmer has walked the dunes home.