Salt Provenance

The tide pools hold their prisoners loosely— anemones furling like small fists around the afternoon light, and the water remembers nothing of the storm that filled it.

I have walked this shore before in a different body, with different hands turning over stones slick as promises. Each time the coast revises itself, leaves its corrections in wet sand.

Somewhere inland a river is losing its argument with granite, carrying the evidence seaward in particles too fine to name. This is how mountains confess.

The salt on my lips could be ancient, could be yesterday's wave still finding its way back. I taste the whole atlas in it— the long autobiography of water.

What the gulls know and won't say: that everything solid is only patience made visible, and the sea is just the earth trying to remember how to move.