Inventory of Salt

The cellar keeps its small white weather— jars of it, gray at the shoulders, each grain a closed door the ocean forgot to walk back through.

My grandmother measured grief by the pinch, salting the bread, the wound, the long afternoons, until even her silences had a taste you could keep.

What the sea gives up it gives slowly: a crust on the dock rope, a rime on the boot, the body learning its own brackish arithmetic— how much to hold, how much to weep away.

I press a thumb to the windowsill and lift a constellation to my tongue. Somewhere a tide is undressing a stone, patient as a name said over and over until it means only the saying.