Salt Provenance

The tide pools hold their councils after dark, anemones closing like fists around whatever the last wave offered them— a splinter of shell, a filament of kelp, the trust of small transparent things.

I have walked this coastline counting the distances between one stone and the next, as if measure could outlast the water's slow, devoted argument against every surface it touches.

There was a house here once. You can tell by the way the dune grass leans away from where the door would have been, the sand still packed in the shape of someone's particular gravity.

The salt remembers what the wood forgets— each board it entered, each nail it loosened, the grain it followed like a sentence it was determined to finish long after the speaker had gone.

Tonight the fog will come in low and the whole shore will taste of erasure, that clean, mineral nothing that makes room for what happens next, patient as a blank page drying in the sun.