What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back its hem and leaves the shore streaked white as an old scar.

Everything the sea takes it keeps in solution— the hull of a skiff, the name someone called across a dock.

We came with our pockets full of names and let them go at the waterline, watching them dissolve into something older than grief.

The gulls do not mourn. They circle the updraft with the patience of a question no one thought to ask.

At dusk the horizon seams shut. Salt dries on your lips and you taste, briefly, how vast the forgetting has to be to hold all this.