Salt, you are sting
and savor, taste
and blindness.
With rice and paper,
you are wealth, once traded
for gold, the beautiful
for the necessary, pound
for pound. You are tongue's
tip, the cube's beginning, the first
crystal, simpler than diamond.
From you I learned
osmosis, that beautiful slip
of a word, the movement of the world
towards balance, the hinge of poetry
and science. You are the witch's tool,
the devil's blindness. I have watched
a drying tide-pool spread your lace of loss
across dark rocks. Our life's beginning, here,
our first spice. You are payment
and promise, the heat's release.
You are the wound
rubbed, the field ruined,
the tear's tight streak.
You are work. You are the end
of rivers, the cure
of time. You are the first lesson
in dissolution, how
I always imagined Ionic
pillars toppling in water,
and then, the stir of ions,
the battery sputtering,
the little light bulb
flickering on.
