Plant at First Light

At the desalination plant before dawn, tanks breathe like sleeping whales in corrugated light, salt fog climbs the railings and beads on my wrists, the sea keeps handing us its bitter ledger.

Inside, membranes hum-thin lungs of stitched polymer- and every drop arriving from darkness is pressed through a choir of narrowing gates until it forgets the language of brine.

Gulls wheel above the intake towers, white commas in the sentence of wind; their cries strike metal and ring back silver, as if morning were being tuned by hand.

By sunrise, the city opens its faucets and never sees this room of valves and thunder. Still, in each glass lifted to the mouth, an ocean turns quiet and chooses mercy.