Salt Margin

The tide pulls back its long syllable and the rocks appear, slick-shouldered, wearing their green pelts of algae like something they meant to say but swallowed.

A heron lifts one leg as if testing the weight of standing still. The whole bay hinges on that gesture— held breath between two waves, the pause a bell makes after ringing.

I have come here to unlearn the grammar of clocks. The sea has no paragraphs, only this continuous sentence rewriting its shore.

Driftwood arranges itself into an alphabet no one assigned. I read it anyway: salt, dispersal, the ordinary trust of things that let the current take them.

Evening lowers its dark cloth. The water keeps its one appointment, faithful as erosion, and I walk back carrying nothing but the sound of it, still going.