Brinefield at Evening

At the plant where the sea is taught to pass through silk, membranes glow like pale lungs in a long glass ribcage. The tide arrives in its iron shoes, and leaves its salt in quiet heaps.

Pipes hum their low string, a hymn without words. Beneath the catwalk, brine turns itself to a dark mirror and the gulls lean over, startled by their double, a white comma drifting in a sentence of water.

Workers peel their gloves, maps of mineral dust on their wrists. They talk of tomorrow's heat and the price of a cup, while the pumps cool down, a slowed heartbeat finding its own tempo in the dusk.

Night settles like a tarp over the holding tanks. Far out, the horizon tightens to a seam of ink. We drink the sky by the glass and call it clear, as if the ocean never once had to be asked.