The salts
The salts in the sea soak into raw wood, whether board or knotty root washed away, to age them prematurely. Wood drifting out of the old seas of preoccupied days looking back toward the shore, or dropped out upon evacuate sandbars, or kept, after high waters recede, in the obstructed arcades and embedded routes that burrow through rooms and chambers in order to open at some point along the water, grows silver and dessicated. You should simply sink. Drowning is a death that preserves your form. A slow saline impregnation where in the shallows of a migrating sandbar risen beneath you, just below the seaside city sidewalks, the sun plays down through suspended silt to heat the salt from the water, to replace your matter slowly with silt and salt upon water vapour in the shape of the cavity you have evacuated. The bark sloughs away as the waters recede and in the bald sun the smooth remains of the wood dry. The drying surface area shrinks and crystallizes with fine fissures and splits, salty pits corrode and an unwashed mineral patina bonds with the flesh, indivisible bodies of reflected salt collocate in harboured hollows. The water about your calves flows. Thready ripples fan out in a wake trailing in the direction from which you came yet you are still. The water drops, leaving a darkened wash from the high water mark on your stocking. The water falls beneath a second pair of stockings rolled to just below your ankles in a thickened bead and recedes down to the sidewalk in front of a recessed porch beneath an apartment facing the street. Silver smooth webs of driftwood branches are leaned against the wall back beneath the overhang in a drift. Stacked precariously in temporary gravity they cast lengthening translucent shadows on the whitewashed board and batten. Pinned behind the lattice of wood and draped over it and pierced by it, a collection of grey frayed fishing nets is discarded. The wall is in disarray, haphazard, immediate. There is a single door hanging open on darkness beyond the debris. An ornate carving of an osprey with wings flatly outstretched on a shield marked with the faces of lions, head and beak turned east, stoic, hangs on rusted iron pegs to the east of the door, above the driftwood. In profile, a single, pupilless eye looks toward you, taking in perhaps your entire frame, you cannot tell its focus for lack of pupil, your shoes, your pockets, your grey eyes, your silver skin, split and cracked on your cinched fingers.
