What the Tide Keeps

The shore does not remember every wave, only the slow carving — the bowl worn into sandstone where the egret stands.

I have been trying to hold the exact weight of your voice saying my name in a dark room, but language is porous, and the body forgets before the mind does, or after.

The kelp dries into something unrecognizable. What was supple becomes a rattle, a hull, a geometry the wind moves through.

Still the tide returns, not the same water but the same pressure, the same argument the sea makes against the land — patient, without conclusion, luminous in its wanting.

Some griefs are like that. Not resolved but redistributed, salt into soil, weight becoming the shape of the ground you stand on without thinking.