Cartography of Salt

The estuary does not remember the river that made it. Only the widening, only the taste of two waters arguing at the mouth.

My grandmother kept a jar of soil from a country that no longer used her name. She never opened it. The lid grew into the glass like a healed wound.

I have stood at the edge of things — the last train platform, the hospital corridor, a field where the snow had almost given up — and felt how endings spread outward, how they need so much room.

Cartographers once marked the unknown with sea monsters and conjecture. I prefer their honesty. Better a drawn beast than a blank pretending to be nothing.

What I know of grief: it is not the depth but the shoreline that keeps changing, the way salt always finds the thing you thought had healed.