Cartography of Salt

The tide does not remember the shore it carved — only keeps moving, only keeps spending itself against whatever stays.

My grandmother's hands knew the names of every bone in a fish. She held them up to the kitchen light the way you hold a letter you already know the end of.

I have been mapping the places where things dissolved: the harbor at low water, the bed of a river gone dry, the spot on the table where a glass stood for thirty years.

Salt is what remains when the water leaves. A white ghost of the shape things held — all that tenderness pressed flat into mineral.

Somewhere a woman is teaching a child the names of the bones. The light comes through the window the same way it always has. The child will forget. The child will remember.