Cartography of Salt

The tide chart my grandfather kept was not about the sea. Each penciled arc a door he'd opened, each margin note a place he'd stood when the water said: no further.

I found it folded in his coat pocket months after, the paper soft as something that had learned to stop expecting to be read. The harbor it described no longer matched the harbor.

We inherit the maps of the wrong coastlines. We walk out at low tide following someone else's measurements, and the sand holds our weight only long enough to show we passed.

Still I trace his annotations— the depth at Breakwater Point, the rip he named after a fishing boat lost in '61. Not to navigate. Only to hold the instrument of his attention, and feel how carefully he measured what he could not keep.