Salt Meridian

The terns follow a line only they can see, stitching the Atlantic to the curve of afternoon, their wingbeats ticking like a clock wound by the pull of warmer water.

Below them the freighter holds its rust against the argument of waves, its hull a diary of ports — Dakar, Recife, the smudged chalk of forgotten manifests dissolving in the bilge.

I stood once where the salt flats cracked into hexagons at noon, each cell a small country with its own flag of evaporation, its own brief, glittering parliament.

What migrates is not the body but the habit of departure — the way a tongue still shapes the vowels of a city it will never say aloud again.

Even the sea forgets its depth in places, going shallow over sandbars where the light arrives unbroken, and the water holds so still you could read the future in its floor.