The Saltwater's Edge

Lyrics

[Intro]

[Verse 1]
Before the property lines, there was the mud.
The Ohlone kitchen, smelling of salt and woodsmoke.
A million tiny shells, piled high over a thousand years.
A testament to hunger, a marker of home.
The edge was simply where the water stopped
and the food began.

[Verse 2]
Then the trucks came, sometime in the forties.
Grinding gears and the groan of shifting weight.
They pushed the edge out with the city's garbage.
Broken tiles, bed frames, chunks of concrete.
A strange kind of landfill genesis.
We fed the Bay our refuse for fifty years,
and in return, it gave us this new ground.
This Bulb.

[Chorus]
The saltwater's edge is never just a line on a map.
It is a long, slow conversation.
It takes our sharpest mistakes—
the rebar sticking out like a bone—
and tumbles them back smooth.
The Bay breathes in over the mudflats.
The Bay breathes out.

[Verse 3]
A man in a bright jacket throws a ball for his dog
on land that shouldn't exist.
The sandpipers, frantic and delicate,
pick through the shallows.
They don't seem to mind the foundation of old glass beneath their feet.
The feast is the feast, no matter who set the table.

[Bridge]
And just down the shore, the grandstand is quiet.
The last post has sounded at Golden Gate Fields.
Eighty years of pounding hooves, gone.
The edge is preparing to change its shape again.
The water waits patiently.
It has seen maps redrawn before.

[Outro]
The tide turns, swallowing the shore.
The fog horn calls again, a long, low question.
The water covers a piece of brick, worn smooth as a stone.