Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits, depositing its white receipts along the rocks, withdrawing before anyone can argue the balance.

I found a nautilus on the strand once, its chambers still holding the arithmetic of a creature that grew by leaving each room it had perfected.

The fishermen's wives knew this grammar — how salt preserves and salt erodes in the same slow syllable, how a net must be mostly absence to catch anything at all.

Evening now. The harbor water holds the town inverted, looser, all the sharp addresses smudged. A cormorant drops through its own reflection and comes up glistening, unbothered by the seam.

What I mean is: everything I've lost still seasons what I carry. The sea does not distinguish between giving back and taking away.