Inventory of a Tide Pool

When the sea exhales and steps back, it leaves a coin of water in the rock, a small economy of light and salt where anemones open their slow green purses and ask the morning for change.

Here a crab rehearses its sideways argument, here the limpet keeps its single stubborn vow, and a snail draws a silver sentence across the stone, erasing it even as the meaning sets.

I crouch above this borrowed window and watch my own face float, uninvited, among the drifting weed — a stranger the pool tolerates the way a held breath tolerates the throat that holds it.

Soon the tide will come to collect what it lent: the minnow, the trembling skin, the whole bright ledger of the shallows. Nothing here believes in keeping. Everything here is fluent in return.