Salt Margin

The tide drags its hem across the flats, leaving a cursive no one asked for — kelp and crab shell, a frayed bootlace, the usual alphabet of going.

I stand where the sand turns firm enough to hold a heel print for eleven seconds. I have counted. The water has no interest in my metrics.

Somewhere inland a kitchen light goes amber against the dusk, and a woman sets down a glass with the soft click of a period ending a sentence she never said aloud.

Out here the plovers stitch the waterline shut behind them, running as if lateness were a country they'd been banished from. The last light pools in the hollows of their tracks.

I could walk back now. The salt has drawn a new margin on my boots, a pale tide-ring like the one inside a cup left too long on a desk — proof that something was here, and warm, and full.