Salt Dialect

The tide has a grammar no one transcribes— each wave a clause collapsing into foam, the undertow a parenthetical that swallows what it meant to say.

I stood where the harbor silted shut and listened to the buoys rehearse their one bronze syllable, the fog erasing every sentence before the shore could answer back.

My grandmother spoke a dialect the linguists gave a number, not a name. It tasted, she said, of herring and of rain, and now it lives only in the way I pause before I ask for bread.

There are languages the ocean keeps— kelp-script, the cursive of the current, whole alphabets of brine dissolving on the rocks like sugar on a child's tongue.

Some nights I dream in tides. I wake with salt behind my teeth and words I almost understand, as if the water tried once more to teach me what it lost.