Salt Cartography

The tide withdraws its silk and leaves a map no one commissioned— ridgelines of brine, small kingdoms of broken mussel shell.

I kneel where the water was and press my thumb into wet sand, watching the impression fill with sky the color of weak tea.

There was a house here once, or so the pilings say, their wood gone silver as a moth's closed wing.

What the salt remembers it writes in mineral cursive across the flats each morning, then permits the wind to edit.

I have loved places that were already leaving— the sentence half-spoken, the anchor lifting before I learned the name of the bay.