Cartography of Salt

The estuary remembers every river that poured itself into nothing here — a slow forgetting, brackish and wide, the mud still holding the shape of what passed.

You said the sea has no memory but I watched the tide return to the same hollow in the same rock, filling it like a name it cannot stop saying.

I have mapped the wrong coast all my life, charting inlets that drain before morning, headlands that blur when the fog comes in, believing the land would hold still for me.

Now the light is low and the grasses lean east the way everything leans away from something it loves. Even the heron stands in its own reflection as though learning to be two things at once.

Salt crystallizes where the water was. That is not loss — or not only loss. That is the water leaving its signature on everything it touched before it left.