Salt Lexicon

The tide keeps its own vocabulary— a low hiss for the pull back over gravel, a deeper vowel for the open swells that have traveled without interruption since the last unnamed storm.

I stood in water to my shins once and felt the syllables rearrange. The cold said something about attention, about how little we retain when we insist on paraphrase.

Driftwood arrives with its cargo of silence, worn to the shape of a question no one living remembers asking. I turn it in my hands the way you turn a word you almost know.

Somewhere a freighter crosses the shelf where the color changes, and the sea forgets nothing— not the latitude of every wreck, not the salt it borrowed from the rivers.

I walk back through the marram grass with sand in the folds of my cuffs, carrying a language I can only speak when the water is around me, and even then, only in fragments.