Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar no one transcribed — each wave a clause retracting itself, the reef's slow answer worn into the shape of listening.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on the kitchen sill, translucent as old quarrels finally forgiven. She said the ocean was editing every broken thing toward beauty.

I think of this at estuaries where freshwater argues with brine, that brackish negotiation where salmon decide what they are willing to become.

There is a dialect of salt the blood still recognizes — the way a wound recalls the sea, the way a tear inherits its precise and ancient chemistry.