Salt Library

The tide keeps its own catalogue— each wave a page turned back before anyone can read it, the foam already revising what the shore tried to hold.

I found a nautilus once, chambered like a sentence that kept qualifying itself, smaller and smaller rooms leading toward a silence even the ocean couldn't fill.

There is a library in the salt. Volumes of arrival and withdrawal, the marginalia of kelp and broken glass, stories the gulls carry off in pieces too small to reassemble.

My mother said the sea remembers every swimmer. I think it's the opposite— the sea is what forgetting sounds like when it's honest, that long exhale across the rocks wearing everything to sand.