Salt Calendar

The tide keeps its own calendar, scratching each day into the rocks with a thumb of salt and froth, then erasing it by afternoon.

I found a year I thought I'd lost wedged between two barnacled stones— it smelled of diesel and night-blooming jasmine, still damp, still ticking faintly like a watch dropped overboard.

How strange that water holds what the mind lets slip: the grain of your voice at the pier, fog horns stitching the dark into something almost whole.

The gulls have no use for sequence. They steal from any season— a June sardine, a December updraft— and carry it screaming into the present tense.

I am learning their grammar slowly, how to stand at the edge of what I remember and let the waves rewrite it, each version truer than the last.