Salt Dialects

The tide has a grammar no one taught it, subordinate clauses folding over sand, each wave revising what the last one meant.

I stood where the estuary thins to glass and listened for the verb — that hinge between what the water carries and what it leaves.

My grandmother spoke a dialect the atlas never named. She'd say the word for longing and it tasted like the underside of shells, like iron, like the hour before a storm consents to fall.

Now I find her consonants in surf-foam, in the way a cormorant drops without apology into the green. The ocean doesn't translate. It insists.

Some languages survive only in the body — in the wrist's rotation wringing cloth, in the tongue's press against the teeth before a name we haven't said in years suddenly arrives, salt-bright and whole.