Salt Cartography

The tide draws maps we never asked for, charts the shin bones of the jetty in algae and barnacle script, each low water a revision, each storm a new edition.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass clouded as a cataract, green the color of old bottles, old intentions. She called them tumbled-down wishes. I called them patience made visible.

Somewhere the Atlantic is still practicing the same sentence it has always been writing, revising the coast one grain at a time, a manuscript of dissolution no archivist will finish.

At the harbor mouth the cormorants spread their wings like open palms — not flight, but the drying of feathers, the ordinary work of being made to live between two worlds.