Salt Margin

At the salt margin where the reef thins out the water keeps its small museums— anemones contracting like fists of violet silk, a hermit crab wearing last season's architecture, the constant argument of surge and drain.

I knelt there once with a kitchen colander, thinking I could sort the living from the dead. Everything moved. Even the broken shells shuttled sideways in the backwash, performing a diligence I mistook for life.

What the tide pool teaches is not patience but the poverty of looking without entering— how the limpet holds its single breath of stone, how the water, even captured, goes on answering to the moon's far pull.

By afternoon the sun had burned a lens into the shallow bowl. Each creature cast a shadow larger than itself, and I understood that shade is the first autobiography.

I left nothing. Took nothing. The water replenished its exhibits, and the margin moved, as margins do, neither toward me nor away— just the ordinary indifference of what persists.