Salt Cartography

The tide rewrites its boundaries each evening, erasing the morning's evidence— the child's moat, the sandpiper's corridor, the long diagonal of a shadow that once belonged to someone standing still.

I have watched maps dissolve this way. The cartographer draws a coastline but the sea has already moved on, indifferent, revising its argument in white foam.

What we call shore is only negotiation, the water's perpetual offer and the land's slow withdrawal— each wave a sentence that forgets itself before it reaches the end.

My grandmother kept salt in a blue dish on the sill. She said it was to honor something— the ocean, the wound, the year her village stopped being a place.

I press my tongue to nothing now and taste the shape of what has gone: mineral, cold, carrying its distance like a message sealed before the words were chosen.