Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit, shelved in the ribs of ships that forgot their names.

I found a page once, pressed flat between two stones at the waterline, its ink dissolved to a blue indistinguishable from sky.

What was written there had weight enough to sink a hull, or so the barnacles murmured when I held my ear against the oldest pier in town.

Now the harbor silts in slow degrees, and the fishermen's wives fold nets like closing arguments, each knot a sentence served.

Somewhere beneath the green confusion, the library expands — one volume for every word the waves have swallowed back to salt.