Salt Library

The tide keeps a library beneath the pier, volumes bound in kelp and broken shell, each page a sediment of what we said the summer the boardwalk still held our weight.

I found a jar of sea glass on the sill where your letters used to dry. Every shard had been a bottle once, a sharp thing the water taught to glow.

There is a grammar to erosion — how the cliff face learns a new sentence each winter, how the dunes conjugate themselves into elsewhere.

Salt does not forget. It only changes what it touches: wood to silver, iron to lace, a name carved in the rail to something the fog can read.

I walk the wrack line at low tide, gathering what the ocean has annotated — a crab claw, a bit of rope, the spine of a book that must have held some poem like this.