Salt and Geometry
Poems about things that dissolve and things that hold their shape.
Tides
The bay exhales at six. Water pulls back its silver cloth to show the ribs of the earth — sand, stone, the bent spines of kelp arranged like letters in a language I almost know.
By noon the water has returned and the message is gone. I stand at the edge, waiting for the next draft.
Kitchen, 4 AM
The faucet keeps its one-note song. Outside, the maple holds the dark like a glass holds water — loosely, by surface tension and habit.
I crack an egg into a bowl. The yolk sits there, a small sun in its white sky, and for a moment the kitchen is a planetarium with an audience of one.
Proof
Consider the triangle: three lines that lean on each other and call it stability.
Remove any one and the others fall into a different truth.
This is also how I understand family, and load-bearing walls, and certain friendships that I should not have tested.
Salt
The ocean is three percent salt. This is enough to kill a garden but not a whale. Scale changes everything.
A teaspoon of grief in an ocean of years dissolves to nothing. A teaspoon of grief in a Tuesday afternoon is enough to stop the clock.
I keep my griefs in small containers and my years wide open. This is the only math that has ever saved me.
Geometry of Leaving
The shortest distance between two people is not a line but a silence shaped like a door.
I know this because I have stood on both sides, measuring.
The door is always the same width. Only the hallway changes — longer each time, and darker, and lined with photographs of rooms I used to know by heart.