Salt Library

The tide has taken back its archive — kelp manuscripts, the cursive of a wave's last breath on stone. I found a shell that held the hum of every room I've left without locking.

What the salt preserves is not the body but the listening. A dock at low water reveals its barnacled ribs, each one a sentence started in a language I almost spoke as a child.

There are libraries like this, where the books have no spines and the pages turn themselves according to the wind's slow argument with the cliffs.

I sat until the fog erased the headland. Not grief exactly — more the quiet after someone closes a piano lid and the strings go on vibrating into wood.