Salt Cartography

The tide keeps no archive of its grievances, only the patient work of unmapping— each wave subtracting a syllable from the cliff face until the stone forgets the name it held.

I have watched how salt rewrites a window, leaves its white cursive across the glass like a letter from someone who has dissolved into the weather they warned you about.

The cartographers were wrong about coastlines. They drew them once and called it done, not knowing that every shore is mid-sentence, mid-erasure, leaning into the argument.

What remains is not the land but the specific light that finds it— the way noon arrives on wrack and kelp like recognition, like the beginning of grief that finally consents to being named.