Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its silk across the rocks and somewhere beneath the froth a compass needle spins without conviction, pointing toward every shore at once.

I have walked this meridian before— salt crusting the hem of a coat I no longer own, wind tasting of kelp and kerosene and distances that have no names in any atlas.

The fishermen mend their nets at dusk, fingers moving through the lattice like pianists rehearsing a nocturne only the harbor remembers.

There is a theory that the ocean holds every sound ever spoken near it, that waves are just the consonants of all our accumulated whispers folding back upon themselves.

I press my ear to the wet sand and hear nothing, which is to say I hear the whole accumulated hush of everything the water chose to keep.