Salt in the Margins

The lighthouse keeper's hand trembles on the rope—not from age, but from counting the years in the spacing of the stones.

The tide comes with its briefcase full of small forgetting, deposits what we've lost in the folds of the shore.

I've memorized the way light refracts through broken glass, how salt crystallizes on wood, how memory becomes landscape.

Some mornings the water tastes of ancient things—ships, letters never sent, the vowels we swallowed whole.

We are learning to live in the spaces between what we were and the salt that remains.