Salt Cartography

The estuary keeps forgetting its own mouth, rehearsing the same collapse of silt and tide until the map we drew last summer is only a rumor of lines.

I learned your name the way water learns a shore— pressure, then recession, then the faint embossing left in sand that the next wave calls its own.

Somewhere a cartographer is marking what the salt has taken: the dock, the boathouse, three pines that stood like unfinished sentences against the January sky.

We were so certain of the distances. Certain of the ferry's low horn at dusk, the particular weight of waiting before crossing into the far light.

Now the estuary is drawing new conclusions, rewriting the clause between land and water, and I am left with your coordinates filed under a coast that no longer holds.