Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit— volumes of kelp-script curling shut, each wave a page turned back before the sentence ends.

I found a conch once, pressed it to the wrong ear, heard my father humming something tuneless over a sink of dishes, his sleeves rolled past the elbows like a man preparing to deliver news.

What the ocean indexes it does not intend to keep. Sand dollars, vertebrae of fish, the rusted eyelets of a shoe— all of it provisional, all of it on loan.

Sometimes I walk the wrack line at that hour when light forgives every hard surface, and I read what the salt has underlined: the ordinary, the ordinary, the ordinary.