Salt Lectures

The tide keeps its own hours, dragging a white hem across the rocks where someone once carved initials that the sea has made illegible.

I press my ear to a conch and hear not the ocean but the small hum of my own blood, mistaking itself for something vast.

Driftwood arranges itself along the wrack line like a sentence missing its verb — all subject, all waiting, no action to speak of.

A gull drops a mussel from height, lets gravity do the opening. There is a lesson here about patience, or violence, or both.

By evening the water has taken back every footprint I offered it. The sand remembers nothing, and I envy it, and I don't.