Salt Meridian

The tide pulls its white hem back across the flats, exposing what the water kept in confidence— ribbed sand, a crab's discarded armor, the ordinary scripture of shells.

I walked here once with someone whose name the wind has taken. We pressed our heels into the margin where wet met dry, and watched each print fill slowly, become a pool, become nothing.

Now the lighthouse turns its one good eye across the dusk. Somewhere a buoy swings its iron bell for no ship, and the sound travels the salt meridian to arrive at my chest like a question.

What the sea gives back is never what it borrowed. The driftwood returns bleached of its forest, the glass returns without its edges, and I return without the need to name the loss.

A heron stands in the shallows, patient as a letter never sent. The last light catches its stillness and holds it, briefly, the way water holds the shape of a hand.