Low Tide Inventory

The estuary exhales and leaves its pockets open— a comb of mussel shells, a bottle furred green, the keel-print of a boat that has not come back. I walk the silver mud like a clerk of small losses, counting what the water forgot to keep.

Gulls unstitch the morning with their crying. Somewhere a heron stands so still it becomes a question the reeds keep asking the wind. The light is thin as the skin on cooling milk, and everything wears the gray of a held breath.

My boots fill with the cold archive of the sea. Here is a crab's abandoned argument with its own armor, here a feather laid down like a comma in wet sand. I pick up nothing. I only learn the names the way one learns a face that is leaving.

When the tide turns it will take all this back, unsay the shells, redraw the heron's place, fold the green bottle into its blue forgetting. I stand at the seam where the world keeps no record, and feel, for once, gratefully un-kept.