Salt Geometry

The tideline leaves its cursive on the rock, each letter dissolving before the sentence ends. I have watched this all morning — the sea composing and erasing, composing and erasing, as if revision were the only honest act.

Farther out, a cormorant folds itself into the water like a black envelope. What it carries down I cannot read, but it surfaces with silver in its throat, a word too slippery for air.

The salt crystals on the railing hold the geometry of vanished waves — hexagonal, provisional, bright as the blueprints of a house no one intends to build.

I think of how we spoke last autumn, our voices thinning over the phone like fog pulling apart above the harbor. What remained was not the words but the intervals between them.

Tonight the tide will take the railing's crystals. Tomorrow, new ones. The sea does not grieve its own revision. It only turns the page.