Cartography of Salt

The estuary remembers what the sea forgets— how silt accumulates in soft parentheses, how a heron's patience becomes the patience of the marsh itself.

We learned geography from departures. Your hands, making the old gesture of pointing toward something unnamed, left a latitude I still navigate by, a meridian drawn in the body's dark atlas.

Between the sandbar and the keening grass a channel runs that has no name on maps. It fills with rain and empties with the tide and fills again — indifferent, inexact, which is another word for faithful.

What the cartographers could not record: the light in early April, how it arrives sideways through the cordgrass, how it makes the ordinary water briefly impossible to look at.