Salt Cartography

The tide has drawn its own map again, channels braiding through the mudflat like veins visible beneath thin skin, and I am learning to read what the water refuses to keep.

Each morning the estuary revises itself— sandbars migrate, pools appear where yesterday there was only the packed silence of wet ground. A heron stands in the margin, unalarmed.

I used to believe in fixed borders, the way a child believes a river is the same river twice. Now I watch the salt grass lean into whatever direction the wind has chosen.

There are whole vocabularies dissolved in the floodplain: the creak of a dock that no longer exists, a lighthouse whose beam sweeps a shore already rearranged.

What remains is not the shape but the habit of shaping— water over sand, light over water, the estuary's patient insistence that nothing is finished, only left open.