Tide Grammar

At low tide the pier reveals its ribs, wooden vowels slick with salt and shadow. The bay turns a page with a slow, glass thumb, and gulls punctuate the margins with their white ink.

Below the swells, cables hum like sleeping bees, strung through darkness that never learned to blink. I imagine the messages braided inside— a choir of distant rooms, a million small lamps.

Evening arrives on the back of a freighted fog. The water takes everything, then gives a little back: a coin of moon, a bottle of quiet, the smell of iron and wet stone on my hands.

I stand where the land edits itself into the sea, listening for the sentence I can keep. Somewhere a current turns the words toward shore, and I am almost fluent in the tide.