Salt Cartography

The tide does not remember what it swallowed— each wave arrives the same, indifferent, dragging a fringe of foam across the sand like a sentence that forgets its beginning.

I tried to map the place you were. I pressed my palms to the cold chart of it, feeling for the ridge of something left, the way a tongue seeks the gap of a lost tooth.

What remains is depth without edges. A color that is not blue but close to blue, the way silence is close to sound just after the door shuts.

The gull lands where the water thins to glass and lifts again before the wave can reach it. I have been practicing this lift for years— how to leave before I am covered.

Somewhere the sea is still drawing its maps, revising, then erasing, then beginning with the long patient strokes of whatever does not grieve and does not stop.