Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own calendar, scratching tallies into the rock face with a patience I will never learn.

I found a mussel shell this morning hinged open like a book whose pages had been licked clean, every word returned to brine.

There was a summer I pressed seaweed between the leaves of a notebook, believing I could carry the coast inland. By autumn the pages smelled of nothing.

Now I sit where the harbor wall meets the water's changing argument, letting the salt sting my lips until I taste something older than myself.

The waves rehearse their one syllable. I listen for the vowel underneath, the long exhale before the next bright, indifferent arrival.