Tidepool Observatory

At low tide the city folds its sleeve, revealing a small atlas of glass. Each pool is a hush you can step into, sky inverted, stitched with floating sand.

A crab rehearses the architecture of leaving, its shadow a small clock on stone. Barnacles hold like old vowels on a tongue, salt brightens the edges of what we forget.

I kneel where the water keeps its ledger, counting the thin planets of mussel and foam. Somewhere, a gull is writing in air, a long cursive that erases itself.

When the tide returns, it closes the book without saying whether the story was mine. Only the wet shine remains, a lens, and the shoreline breathing like a slow machine.