Cartography of Salt

The estuary holds its old names underwater— every syllable a reed, bent, still translating the direction of some vanished current.

We walked the tideline once at dusk, your coat carrying the smell of woodsmoke, our shadows pooling east like spilled ink that forgot how to stop moving.

I have drawn and redrawn this coast. The cliffs keep shifting. The fog arrives without announcement, swallows the lighthouse whole, leaves only its rhythm behind.

Somewhere beneath the salt flats a river continues its argument with stone, finding new channels, not forgetting— only learning that water has never needed permission to go.