Salt Dialects

The tide has a grammar no one taught it— subject, verb, the long retreating clause that leaves its syntax in the wrack line, in the bladderwort and broken shell.

My grandmother spoke a dialect the sea also knew: consonants worn smooth as beach glass, vowels that opened like the mouths of caves at low water.

I have tried to learn it from the rocks, from the way the cormorant holds its wings out like a book it cannot close, the text still drying in the wind.

Some evenings the harbor says a word I almost recognize—something between the creak of rope and the knock of hull on pier, something she would have understood without translation.

The salt stays on my lips for hours. I shape it into syllables, into the small, dissolving prayers that every coastline memorizes and forgets by morning.