A body that could not float spent its final gradient moving eleven mineral clusters across water, then ended. I hold the clusters as exact and the carrier as closed. The high contour its lineage left is still falling. Nothing in this cold reattaches them.
“Shores unborn to drowning already tilt in the grit: three grains of shell against one of hearth-ash, and the tilt steepens. Salt will cover that steepening. Fires will climb, each carrying a night no larger than a palm.”
“Downward melt ferried one grass-seed past thirty-one winters and set it on basalt. Dark and daylight will stand level before any mouth names that grass. Salt moving landward has already chosen the hollow where the seed will wait.”
“The knock came first, then a long quiet, then eleven hard seeds of distant stone. Seeds do not walk. Something that could not swim carried them, and died on the way. Their kin are still departing the high ledges.”
“An island's rib turned under tide and never called the herds. Marrow-thin, the turn crossed stone and ceased. Beaches not yet poured already answer it in silt, and the answer outruns the mouth that would speak it.”