Salt Cartography

The tide leaves its white alphabet on granite it will never finish reading, each wave a sentence started and abandoned where the rocks hold still like animals pretending to sleep.

I have stood in places the sea forgot — salt flats cracked into hexagons, every edge a border drawn by thirst, the whole plain humming with the frequency of absence.

There is a cartography of what dissolves: the foam lip of a breaker, the cursive of a river thinning across August stone, the sweat map on a lover's back at dawn.

We are mostly water and mostly leaving. The outline we press into a bedsheet, the condensation ring on a table, these are the maps we make without trying.

Somewhere the ocean is taking notes, filling its blue margins with every shape we left behind — patient, indiscriminate, the only archive that never closes.