Salt Liturgy

The tide pulls its white vestments back across the flats, exposing what it held— razor clams, bottle glass rubbed to milk, the iron spine of something built to last.

I kneel where the water was. The sand remembers pressure differently than I do, gives way where I press, fills in the moment I lift my hand.

Cormorants stitch the fog to the sea with their diving, rising slick and unburdened. They carry nothing from the deep but the impulse to return to it.

There is a grammar to erosion— how the bluff offers itself grain by grain, how the driftwood learns the shape of every wave that turned it.

I have come here to practice the plain art of standing still, letting the salt air undo what I knotted in the city, thread by patient thread.