Salt Dialects

The tide speaks in a grammar older than vowels, each wave a clause collapsing on the sand, leaving its argument in foam and broken shell.

I used to think the sea repeated itself but now I hear the variations — how Tuesday's surf carries a different weight than Sunday's, how the water after storms pronounces every consonant.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a sill where light passed through them like speech through an open window. She said each piece remembered the bottle it had been, the message it once carried.

There is a dialect the salt flats speak at dusk when the water draws back thin as paper and the exposed ground glistens with a vocabulary too precise for us — every crystal a syllable of evaporation.

I press my ear to the wet sand and hear the ocean composing its next sentence underground, the deep syntax of tides still choosing its words.