Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than bone, each wave a clause collapsing into foam, leaving its argument in scalloped lines the sand will hold for minutes, then forget.

I used to think the sea had one voice. Now I hear the plural — the hiss of retreating shingle, the baritone that rolls through underwater caves, the soprano crack where surf meets basalt.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill in Halifax, each piece a word the ocean had been pronouncing for decades, consonants worn down to vowels.

She said water remembers the shape of every hull that cut it, every stone it swallowed. I believe her now, standing ankle-deep where the cold current stitches my skin.

Listen — the salt is still conjugating, tense after tense of arrival and withdrawal, fluent in the one language we keep almost learning.