What the Tide Knows

The shore keeps nothing willingly. Each wave arrives carrying what some other coast has lost— a bottle, a name half-erased, the cold grammar of shells.

My grandmother washed dishes the way water works stone: patient, unhurried, her hands moving through the same circles for forty years without tiring.

I tried to hold the exact angle of afternoon light on her kitchen wall, but memory is tidal— it recedes and returns wearing different silt.

Now I stand where the land forgets itself into sea, and the waves rehearse that old erasure, faithful as anything that does not choose.