Salt Ledger

The tide keeps its accounts in sand, each wave a struck-through entry— what was owed, what was returned, the balance always shifting beneath the auditor's indifferent moon.

I found a nautilus on the wrack line, chambers spiraling inward like years I can no longer enter, each sealed with a nacre so thin light passes through but nothing else.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on her windowsill, the shards worn to the shape of lozenges, every edge forgiven by the water. She said the ocean finishes what we discard.

Now I stand where the creek empties its handful into the Atlantic, fresh and salt braiding together in a seam that holds for a moment, then loses itself to the larger argument.

What I wanted to keep I wrote in the wet margin where the surf exhales— knowing the next sentence would take it, and the next, and the next.