Salt Covenant

The tide pools hold their small religions— anemones closing around the finger of light, hermit crabs dragging their borrowed heavens across a floor of crushed quartz and time.

I was taught that salt preserves, but here it dissolves the cliff face grain by grain, carries the mountain seaward in a language older than erosion, patient as a grandmother's hands.

There is a covenant between the rock and what unmakes it: that nothing lost is lost entirely. The sandstone becomes the beach becomes the glass some child holds to the sun, squinting.

Even now the waves are writing their one sentence over and over, the shore revising it each time— a collaboration so ancient neither author remembers starting.

I press my palm to the wet stone and feel the hum of all its futures: powder, sediment, the glint in a riverbed no one has named yet, the earth still learning to let go.