Salt Chronicle

The tide keeps its own accounting, each wave a ledger line drawn and erased before the sand can memorize the sum.

I found a bottle once, not with a message but with a residue of brine so old it had forgotten it was ocean, thought itself a kind of stone.

There are vocabularies the shore invents at three a.m. when no one listens— consonants of broken shell, the long vowel of a foghorn swallowed by its own echo.

My grandmother said the sea remembers every swimmer. I think it is the opposite: it practices forgetting the way a musician practices scales, over and over until the letting go becomes the song itself.

Tonight the water holds the moon like a word on the tip of a tongue— almost spoken, almost released, that bright syllable of light dissolving where it touches.