Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts— each wave a sentence started, never finished, drawn back into the throat of something larger.

I found a journal on the beach once, its pages fused by brine into a single block of illegible devotion. Someone had written every day for a year to a person who may not exist.

The salt had done what time does more politely: made the private universal, made the specific into texture, into pulp, into the weight of a stone in the hand.

Now gulls wheel above the breakwater and their cries are also a kind of writing— urgent, undirected, aimed at the whole grey sky as if the sky might answer.

I set the journal back among the wrack. Let the next tide take its measure. Some things ask only to be held briefly, then released into the commons of the foam.