Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its long hem back across the flats, leaving behind a calligraphy of foam and kelp that no one bends to read.

I walked here once with someone whose name the water took. The sand kept the shape of our feet for exactly one hour, then revised its opinion.

Somewhere past the breakwater a cormorant stitches the surface shut, dives into the green architecture below and returns with a flicker of silver held like a secret between its jaws.

What the ocean knows about forgetting it teaches slowly — the salt working its way into every wound until the wound becomes indistinguishable from the shore.

I stand at the meridian of low tide, that brief country between what was covered and what will be again, and I practice the ancient posture of letting the waves decide.