What the Tide Leaves

The tide withdraws each morning pulling its cold hem back across the sand, leaving only the grammar of itself— a syntax of shells and smooth stone that no one asked to read.

My grandmother kept a jar of such things on the windowsill above the sink. She never said where the water had been, only that everything returns smaller than it left.

I have sat at the edge of oceans trying to learn the lesson. The wave arrives with everything it knows and spends it all at once, foaming, extravagant, gone.

What remains is not the wave but the way the light behaves after— how it scatters across the wet flats like a sentence breaking open, still meaning something, just differently.