Salt Lessons

The tide pool holds its small parliament of light, anemones closing like fists around what the current offers and retracts.

I learned patience here, kneeling on basalt while the fog unstitched itself from the headland and the herons stood in their long questions.

There is a grammar to the way salt dries, white cursive on the rocks that the next wave will erase without hesitation, and I have spent years trying to read it.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill that faced the west. She said the ocean finishes what we are too afraid to break.

Now I stand where the water argues with the stone, neither winning, both changed, and I hold my open hand out to the spray as if accepting a language I was always meant to speak.