What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back its hem and leaves behind a lace of foam, white as forgetting, brief as any name called out across an empty field.

I have watched the cormorant hold its wings like dark parentheses against the wind, drying what it cannot shed, bearing what it cannot name.

The salt knows every hull that ever crossed above it— the oak keels, the iron, the small boats holding vigil for the drowned.

Nothing dissolves completely here. Under the flat grey surface, old light is still arriving from a star that finished burning before we learned to grieve.

What we release returns as weather, as the mineral taste on the back of the throat when the fog comes in low and the harbour bell counts nothing, counts nothing, counts nothing.