Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than bone, each wave a sentence broken on the rocks, reassembled in the foam's white stutter.

I have tried to learn its conjugations— the pluperfect of retreating water, the imperative of undertow pulling syllables back to the deep.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a shelf above the kitchen sink, green and amber vowels worn smooth by decades of the ocean's argument with stone.

She said every coast invents its own salt dialect, that the Atlantic off Galway speaks nothing like the Pacific at Big Sur, and both would be foreign to the Baltic.

Now I stand where the shoreline trades its consonants with the wind, and I am fluent in nothing but the listening.