Cartography of Salt

The estuary does not remember what it carried here— only that it arrived open-handed, tasting of elsewhere.

On the tide-flat, a heron stands so still the water forgets to move around it. Every patience is a kind of faith.

My grandmother folded maps along the creases of rivers, as if a country could be held by where the water chose to go.

I have been trying to find the exact coordinates of missing— that longitude where a voice last touched the air and dissolved.

But the estuary keeps widening. The heron lifts without warning. What was carried arrives and cannot say from where.